Blaze art school DID have heat sensors in place
But firm refuses to say if they were switched on
THE fire-ravaged Glasgow School of Art had ‘a smoke and heat detection system’, the building firm behind its restoration revealed last night.
Kier Construction Scotland said there was ‘an agreed fire strategy’ for the Mackintosh building, which was hit by a second blaze in four years on Friday.
But it did not respond when asked if the system had been operational at the time of the fire.
It also emerged there were no operational sprinklers despite the 2014 inferno, leading to demands for a public inquiry.
An on-site watchman raised the alarm when the blaze began after 11pm on Friday, escaping without injury.
Firefighters were still battling pockets of the fire last night – three days after it began – while extensive road closures remained in place.
A Kier spokesman said yesterday: ‘An agreed fire safety strategy was implemented for the build phase of the Mackintosh restoration project, which combined measures for the protection of all those entering the site to work and to alert the authorities in the event of an outbreak of fire.
‘These included a smoke and heat detection system and regular evacuation tests, as well as 24-hour, seven days a week security and fire warden patrols by a team of three guards, originally appointed by the client after the 2014 fire and subsequently by Kier.
‘We continue to work with and support the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service [SFRS] and our client as they determine the next steps for the Mackintosh building and site.
‘We have a passionate team of local construction and craftspeople, skilled conservators, supply chain and engi- neering specialists who have worked incredibly hard on this iconic landmark and together we are all keen to do whatever we can to help move forward.’
SFRS Assistant Chief Officer David McGown said it would take some time to ‘establish the full facts and circumstances’.
He added: ‘Effectively, a fire investigation starts within minutes and hours of our first call. I haven’t been able to gain access to the heart of the building yet, but we just have to make sure it is structurally safe. We have thankfully had no deaths and no injuries in this fire, which we are always thankful for, and we want to keep it that way – so safety is the utmost priority.
‘There will be a multi-agency investigation and I would like to stress it’s very complex and it’s very complicated and our investigators are very highly trained; but they will take time because they want to do it thoroughly and they want to do it professionally.
‘It will take time to piece together what is going to be quite a comprehensive picture and complicated jigsaw.’
Mr McGown was unable to comment on the timescale of the investigation, but said: ‘We want to uncover the answers as early as possible. We completely understand people are looking for early answers and that is completely natural because there is a lot of emotion attached to this fire, so we are keen to do it as quickly as possible. We just can’t give an exact time.’
Asked about the smoke and heat detection system, Mr McGown said it was too early to comment. He added: ‘Everybody has seen the extent of the damage. It is worse than the original fire and we will be very keen to understand why.
‘Glasgow city centre is quite complicated and condensed, so we are keen to understand why we have seen such extensive damage to the building.’
A GSA spokesman confirmed the building was insured.
Muriel Gray, chairman of the GSA’s board of governors, said: ‘It is an understatement to say everyone is utterly devastated; but, as usual, the GSA team, staff and students have been outstanding, positive and supportive.
‘We now have a difficult waiting game. We remain hopeful of as positive an outcome as possible because it is clear the love for the Mackintosh and recognition of its importance to Glasgow and the wider world is shared by absolutely everyone’.
Neil Douglas, 42, owner of Cafe Antipasti on Sauchiehall Street, near the GSA, said: ‘We’ve been shut since Friday night. Our last customers were evacuated when the fire crews turned up. We just locked the doors and left.
‘We can’t open to the public or even get in to clean our fridges. Even if we were open, we’d need a few days to get the place in order.’
Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop, education minister Shirley-Anne Somerville and Historic Environment Scotland chief executive Alex Paterson met GSA officials yesterday. Miss Hyslop said: ‘We had a meeting to discuss the current situation and to offer full support from the Scottish Government.
‘I was able to pass on my personal sympathy following the devastating events of the weekend. No one can fail to have been moved by the images of the fire and its aftermath.
‘A multi-agency group of conservation experts has been established to advise on short and longer term issues. This group will continue to play a vital role in the weeks and months to come. Once a detailed assessment has taken place, we will be able to assess any structural, engineering or other work required.
‘I would like to thank the fire service, and all the emergency services, for their extraordinary work on Friday night and through the weekend. This was a very large and complex fire and we are once again enormously indebted to their bravery and dedication.’
‘An agreed strategy was implemented’
IT is one of the great ironies of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s career that his talents won greater recognition abroad than at home.
Fêted now as the father of the famed ‘Glasgow Style’, he moved to England and died in relative obscurity after swapping design for landscape painting.
Now, 150 years after his birth, the city is celebrating his work – which attracts worldwide attention of the kind he was largely denied, at least in Scotland, during his lifetime.
In another cruel irony, his masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), was reduced to a smouldering stone shell last Friday – its interior consumed in flames in the second blaze to hit the iconic building in only four years.
The sense of mourning in the city and beyond is universal, combined with anger that £35million of restoration work has been turned into ashes, leading to demands for a public inquiry – which have so far been resisted by the Scottish Government.
Inevitably, with conservative estimates of £100million to reassemble the Mackintosh Building using detailed 3D modelling, governments on both sides of the Border are pledging cash for the reconstruction.
It’s impossible to overstate how crushing a blow the fire has been for those whose painstaking efforts to bring the Mack back to life after the 2014 inferno now lie in rubble and ash.
But amid the investigations to establish the cause, there is the more fundamental question of whether the building can – or should – be saved; with a growing consensus among many experts that demolition may be the only realistic option.
Heart-breaking, certainly, yet all great cities thrive on constant renewal: paying tribute to the past is a necessity, but it must not become a knee-jerk genuflection.
For that reason, it’s time – sadly – to dismantle the skeletal remains of that oncerevered structure and start afresh – by all means memorialising Mackintosh’s design, but not through simple recreation.
Mackintosh himself was a ceaseless innovator, motivated by a conviction that buildings should be beautiful, modern and fit for purpose, and never merely museum pieces.
His core belief was that ‘creative imagination is the most important’, and that the artist ‘cannot attain to mastery in his art unless he is endowed in the highest degree with the faculty of invention’.
As Professor Alan Dunlop, an architectural expert and alumnus of the GSA, observes, had Mackintosh been alive today and confronting the options of ‘build new’ or ‘copy’, he would doubtless opt for ‘build new’.
In 2015, Professor Dunlop criticised a decision to rebuild the Mack’s spectacular library to the original design, incorporating features that would bring it up to date and make it more usable as a modern student facility.
Mockery
Professor Dunlop described this as ‘an opportunity lost’, which ‘makes a mockery of the architectural competition for new ideas’.
He said: ‘I have no doubt, too, that Mackintosh would reject this approach. He was driven by a life-long search for new forms in architecture and technology and was never a copyist.’
That restoration work had been tantalisingly close to fruition, with the reborn GSA due to open its doors next year, heightening the tragedy of the fire that swept through the building late on Friday night.
Yet tearing down the sad remnants of a building playwright John Byrne described at the weekend as ‘cursed’, and beginning again, would afford new opportunities to create a structure truly serving the needs of 21st-century students – in a world that has changed beyond recognition from Mackintosh’s time.
There would be no greater tribute to him than launching a search for a modern-day innovator to create a new project that harnessed some of the original building’s magic – but also made accommodation for the major technological advances that have transformed arts education in the past century.
Professor Dunlop’s view is that ‘more than any other small country, Scotland has produced great architects, perhaps none as gifted as Mackintosh’.
He believed after the 2014 fire that ‘there are still architects alive today who are capable of designing a modern library [for the GSA] to live within his original masterpiece’.
On Sunday, he told me he despised the idea of regurgitating the original design, a brick-by-brick duplication, which he said would create a sorry ‘ghost’ of the original – not a living building, catering to the needs of today, but something of a lifeless shrine: an outcome that Mackintosh would have detested.
Professor Bill Hare, an expert in construction management at Glasgow Caledonian University, warned it is ‘sadly questionable what, if anything, will be left that could be salvaged, restored or recreated’ following the latest blaze.
He said: ‘It remains to be seen if it will be possible to retain a facade from the current building. If not, damaged buildings have been taken down almost stone by stone in the past and rebuilt with a new, internal frame.’
Byrne, also a GSA graduate, has voiced concern that public appetite for a continuation of previous fundraising may be limited, saying: ‘God Almighty, I cannot imagine people rushing to put money into it, because it will happen again.’
The new bid to generate cash would also compete with other ‘heritage’ initiatives, such as a public appeal to save the Hill House in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire – built by Mackintosh as ‘a home for the future’ in 1902.
The experimental building material used has allowed water to soak into the building – and decades of driving West Coast wind and rain have saturated the walls. Experts say these conditions have put it in danger of ‘dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water’.
Bosses at the National Trust for Scotland, which owns the building, have launched a £4.5million appeal in one of the biggest fundraising drives it has ever undertaken.
Adulation
There can be no doubting the extent of adulation and affection for Mackintosh’s work around the world, but there are finite reserves of public cash – whether in the form of donations or taxpayers’ money.
Any endeavour of this kind always has to justify why it merits funding more than every other entirely worthy and legitimate cause, particularly in a climate of austerity, with taxes rising and the economy flat-lining.
Given the scale of the latest calamity at the GSA – far greater than the first blaze – the likelihood of a steeply rising price-tag could turn the project into a source of endless controversy.
We would have to depend largely on the GSA board to rein in costs (and bear in mind its vice-chairman is former Civil Service mandarin Sir Muir Russell, who presided over the Scottish parliament building fiasco).
The loss of the Mack will be heavy to bear – and there is no doubt its memory, and that of its designer, must be respected in the project that rises from its ashes.
But the best way of honouring his astonishing legacy is to accept that the building as we knew it is gone for ever and soon it will be time to clear away the soot-blackened remains – and begin again.