Glasgow School of Art, ready to rise from the ashes once more
It is hard to think, out of all the great and historic buildings in the British Isles that might be lost to ¿re, of any destruction more heartbreaking than that of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art. It is not just that it is “one of the very best buildings of the early 20th century anywhere in the world”, as the Glasgow-raised writer and architect Douglas Murphy said. It is also that its particular spirit grew from its life as a working art school ever since its ¿rst phase opened in 1899.
The creativity of Mackintosh and his craftspeople, in other words, was not the end of the story, but the setting for that of decade after decade of students. His design allowed their exploration: The rare delicacy of its stained glass and metalwork was combined with bare concrete and rough boards that bore the marks of punishment. It was perilous to be so fragile and workmanlike at once, a riskiness that contributed to the ¿rst of its two ¿res, started in May 2014 by a student project going wrong, theguardian.com reported.
All the more reason, it has been argued, why we shouldn’t be bothered to restore it, after a second and more devastating ¿re last month. What’s gone is gone, said the architectural professor Alan Dunlop and the London design guru Stephen Bayley. Better to cart away its surviving stonework. Let some new Mackintosh demonstrate his or her talent. A new competition should be organized, said the professional competition organizer Malcolm Reading. The great man himself was forward-looking, said Bayley, so wouldn’t have wanted ‘a lame reproduction’.
The nature of its wonder was in the romance and audacity of a structure that piled above Sauchiehall Street like a crag or a castle, but could switch moods on its other side — without changing its palette of materials — to a large-windowed web of ¿ne stone and skinny steel. It was in the carefree way with which Mackintosh, who was in his 20s when he won the competition to design the school, broke and remade customs of symmetry and composition.
It was in the unprecedented way that the design balanced verticals, horizontals, openings large and small, straight lines and curved, and expanses of blank wall with Àurries of intense ornament. There was sheer joy in the naturally inspired motifs; playfulness in taking lines for a walk, and in having fun with the slopes around the edge of the site.
The interior — in fact the essence of the building, of which the exterior was an expression — turned Mackintosh’s fertile invention to the purposes of the art school. There are multiple moods, proportions and effects, and echoes and contrasts.
The Mackintosh building offered journeys of the imagination while also doing a job. It was the miraculous Àowering of a unique moment, when the zenithal power of industrial Glasgow aligned with a belief that art should be cultivated as well as business, and when new techniques of making by machine were matched by still-strong traditions of making by hand. It was a time when new kinds of architecture were ready to grow from the ground prepared by the theories of John Ruskin, William Morris and Eugène Viollet-le-duc.
In Vienna, Paris and Chicago, architects were ¿nding out ways in which the design of buildings could respond to industrial society, a process of discovery from which Mackintosh learned and to which he contributed.
It was also a time when countries and regions such as Finland and Catalonia were recovering architectural identities squashed by larger neighbors. Scotland too: Part of the signi¿cance of Mackintosh’s work is the way it reinvents national character.
The new work will not achieve precisely the same building as the one that burned. It might take decades of life and use to recover all of its present spirit. But a society grows great, as the Greek proverb has it, when the old plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.