(b Brussels, 20 Aug 1848; d Ixelles, Brussels, 13 Dec 1914). Belgian architect, designer, painter and writer. He came from a family of artists: one brother, Charles Baes, was a glass painter and two others, Henri Baes and Pierre Baes, were decorative painters. Jean Baes studied decorative design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and, from 1867 to 1871, in the firm of Charle-Albert. He subsequently trained in architecture in the studios of Emile Janlet, Wynand Janssens and Alphonse Balat. Baes devoted most of his professional career—which was cut short in 1895 by a debilitating illness—to architecture but he also worked as an interior designer, a graphic designer, an architectural draughtsman and, especially, as a watercolourist of architectural subjects. In 1872 he was a founder-member of Belgium’s Société Centrale d’Architecture and after 1874 he collaborated on its journal, L’Emulation. In 1886 he became Assistant Director of the newly established Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Brussels, where his pupils included Paul Hankar and Victor Horta. Baes designed two of Europe’s most formally advanced buildings of the 1880s: the Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg (1883–7) and his own house at Rue Van Moer 12 (1888), both in Brussels. The theatre’s exterior, striated with tiers of fire-escape platforms, used exposed ironwork that was structural and functional and simultaneously produced a decorative effect. The façade of Baes’s residence likewise prominently featured exposed ironwork, and its interior spaces were defined by a series of thin partitions containing large sheets of plate glass in their upper parts. The formal inventiveness, the structural polychromy and the handling of materials and space in these designs deeply impressed Horta, who took over and developed many of Baes’s innovations in his Art Nouveau houses of the mid-1890s.

• Baes, (Pierre-)Jean(-Baptiste)
  • Belgium, §II, 4(iii): Architecture, c 1880–c 1890
  • Belgium, §V, 3: Interior decoration, after 1800