This house was built between 1894 and 1897 to the designs of the architect Octave Van Rysselberghe. It has an astonishingly asymmetrical facade, and the rooms radiate from a huge stairwell, often separated by a few steps. Henry Van de Velde worked with Van Rysselberghe on the interior. The owner, Paul Otlet, was a visionary Renaissance man who was a writer, businessman, lawyer, political activist, Socialist and pacifist. His crowning achievement was the creation in 1895 of the International Bibliographical Office which introduced the Universal Decimal System for classifying books in libraries, developed by Otlet and his friend Henri La Fontaine. He and La Fontaine also introduced the standard format for bibliographical record cards (125mm x 75mm) that is still in use in libraries around the world today.

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