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The symbolist interior and crystal imagination

This paper has been under development for some time. It was first drawn from a keynote address at Colloque Horta at the Academie Royale Belgique in 1997 and later in the Material Imagination conference at the University of St Andrews in 2010. This paper concerns the ‘crystal imagination’ as represented in the architectural interiors and poetry of Belgian symbolism. It develops ideas of transparency, translucency and surface reflectance, material qualities that underpin modernist aesthetics and asks whether the crystal imagination of the late nineteenth century, and the potential for those crystal metaphors to unravel worlds not available to sight, may still may provide rich inspiration for contemporary design.