Mack to the future
AS INVESTIGATORS pick through the remains of Glasgow School of Art following a second massive fire in four years, the art world is coming to terms with what appears to be the total loss of the architectural masterpiece created by design visionary Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Ironically, this year is the 150th anniversary of his birth and celebrations now seem somewhat out of place.
“This was one of the top five Arts and Crafts buildings in the country,” said Michael Jeffrey, 20th century design specialist at Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis. “The loss is tragic.”
Paul Reeves, one of the country’s leading dealers in British furniture and design from the 1840s, said he was devastated.
“It was shocking news, made all the more horrific because it took a member of the public to raise the alarm.
“Sadly, it appears to be a total loss and I for one believe it shouldn’t be rebuilt. I think to rebuild it would create a complete pastiche.
“If some of the façade could be saved and the metalwork used again it would be marvellous, but not restoration. It’s gone.”
The jury was still out at the time of writing. Some experts say the globally significant building was rendered structurally unsound by this latest and more severe fire, while others, including Glasgow North East Labour MP, Paul Sweeney, claim that while the “tangled mess of charred timber and distorted steel joists” of its interior was totally lost, the building could be saved.
Perhaps students at the affectionately nicknamed “Mack” should be given the chance to work with some young up and coming architect and devise an alternative.
Mackintosh might well agree. He enrolled there as an evening student aged 16, and won a competition to design the new school buildings aged just 28.
Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868, the son of a police superintendent, and in 1884 was apprenticed to John Hutchinson.
He completed his articles in 1889 and joined the firm of Honeyman & Keppie, where he soon earned a reputation as an exceptional draughtsman.
His first major project there was to design the Glasgow Herald building in 1899, now The Lighthouse, appropriately Scotland’s centre for design and architecture.
He became a partner in Honeyman & Keppie in 1907.
It was at night school where Mackintosh met fellow architect Herbert Mcnair (1869-1945) and his future wife, Margaret Macdonald, Photo: Dave Souza whom he married in 1900, and her sister Frances, who married Mcnair.
Sharing a love of decorative design and the emerging new art movement, they became inseparable companions later dubbed “The Glasgow Four”, between them evolving an individual style of Art Nouveau, now recognised internationally as the “Glasgow Style”.
A tenet of this was the creation of a totally integrated environment in which every facet of a building, both inside and out, followed a set pattern.
Mackintosh was clearly their leader and with his architectural training, he turned his hand with equal expertise to designing houses and their contents – friezes, plaques, ladderback chairs, hall chimes, silverware, stained glass and chandeliers to ensure everything was “en suite”.
However, while other designers indulged themselves with graceful, flowing swirls, Mackintosh chose geometric, even spartan styles that led his less radical contemporaries to christen them unkindly “The Glasgow Spook School”.
Ignoring his critics and the decadence of the period, Mackintosh continued to experiment with clean-cut verticals and horizontals in both his architecture and his furniture, softened only by the simple use of motifs, notably the Mackintosh Rose, which he adapted from Celtic and medieval Scottish history.
Japan too played an important role is his designs.
The Four worked together for many years, designing everything from posters to metalwork. They exhibited together for the first time in 1894 and two years later they took part in a London exhibition organised by the Arts & Crafts Society.
From 1896 onwards, he and Margaret designed Modernist interiors for elegant Glasgow tea rooms respectively at Argyle Street, Buchanan Street and Ingram Street for Miss Catherine Cranston, the entrepreneurial daughter of a Glasgow tea merchant.
Arguably the best known is Mackintosh’s final creation of its kind, the Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street, which opened in 1903. Today it is regarded as Mackintosh’s most complete interior design.
As well as dozens of pieces of furniture including his iconic high-backed chairs, which were made by the local firm of cabinetmakers Guthrie & Wells, Mackintosh and Margaret designed everything from its lighting and even the unique outfits worn by the waitresses.
Of all of the tea rooms, the Willow’s “Salon de Luxe” was the most lavishly decorated, its light interior featuring a mirrored frieze running along the tops of the walls helping to enhance the bright and spacious feel, while the high-backed, almost sculptural chairs in the stylised shape of a willow tree with latticework backs, afforded privacy for customers.
Now owned by a trust, the Willow Tea Rooms will reopen in July after a £10m renovation.
His other commissions included Photo: Private collection
Windyhill, a house built just outside Glasgow in 1901 for William Davidson, a provisions merchant and a patron of the architect.
Walter Blackie, the Glasgow book publisher, viewed the house at Mackintosh’s invitation and promptly commissioned him to design Hill House in Helensburgh, which was built in 1902. Now open to the public, it was donated to the National Trust for Scotland in 1982.
Sadly, though, unlike their more restrained contemporaries, visionaries often experience difficulties in getting their work accepted by a wider audience.
Mackintosh was no exception. His designs were considered too stark and extreme for the conservative home market, but accepted readily in Europe, most notably in Vienna, where followers of the Secessionist Movement were also experimenting with modernist ideas similar to his own.
Interestingly, he was commissioned to design a music salon for the home of Fritz Waerndorfer, a successful Viennese businessman and patron of the Secessionist group of artists. Ironically, the room was entirely destroyed in a fire, but in 1903, a room setting comprising Mackintosh furniture was exhibited in Moscow.
It contained almost exact duplicates of the furniture that had been lost. Mackintosh had travelled extensively through Europe having won the Alexander Thompson Travelling Scholarship in 1891 and later in life, he and Margaret moved to the South of France, by which time he had abandoned architecture and design due to a lack of commissions. Instead, he concentrated on watercolour painting, producing some beautiful pictures, which are now regarded highly.
Tragically, in 1927 he was diagnosed with throat cancer and the couple returned to live in London.
He died the following year at the young age of 60. Margaret died in 1933.