Glasgow’s burned-out marvel: will the restoration of Mackintosh’s School of Art ever happen?
People wept in the street when the magnificent Mackintosh building was nearly destroyed by two fires. So why, 10 years on and despite overwhelming support for restoration, is there still no plan – or funding – for its repair?Where to start with the Mackintosh building of the Glasgow School of Art? With its fearless originality? With its ability to run many gamuts – dark, light, massive, intimate, crafted, industrial, refined, rough, its spaces long, narrow, high and wide, its conversion of Glaswegian manufacturing wealth into a hilltop castle of art of Scottish baronial might and Japanese-inspired delicacy? Its handling of the things that make architecture beautiful – materials, proportion, detail, ornament, structure, light, contrast – was consummate. It worked magic with stone, iron, oak, stained glass and bent tin, enamel and electric lights, with engineering borrowed from shipyards and with skinny tendrils of plant-like ornament that teetered on the edge of kitsch. It had the nerve to be completely different on every elevation, confident that it would cohere by force of the imagination.It was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who was 29 when he started work on it, and built in two phases from 1897 to 1899 and 1907 to 1909. There has never been another building like it, in Scotland or indeed the United Kingdom, for combining invention with impact, for leading rather than following international architecture. Unlike many of our historic monuments, it still performed the purpose for which it was designed: it combined exquisite craftsmanship with plain boarding on its studios’ walls that could take the battering that art students would inflict on it. It was, as Brad Pitt told the BBC, “an artistic building where art is made and art is learned”. In Peter Capaldi’s words it was “an exotic place of the imagination… a part of me, and of all Glaswegians.” Continue reading...
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