Why Twice?

On​ 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world. Le Monde called it ‘a masterpiece’, ‘one of the most emblematic buildings of the emerging 20th century’. The fire was news in Cuba and Argentina. Brad Pitt, a longtime admirer of the art school, ‘one of the great buildings’, led an appeal for funds to rebuild. There were the usual questions about whether a rebuild was the right thing, but the answer was relatively simple. The library, the crowning achievement of the school, was remarkable not least for being reproducible. Built to a tight budget, it was a cheap design, constructivist avant la lettre. The interior was almost entirely timber, a grid of posts, beams and pegs arranged as a square within a square. The rows of piers rising from floor to ceiling appeared to support a continuous first-floor balcony, which in reality rested on horizontal beams. It was a fantastical yet functional space, and it had been thoroughly documented. To recreate it would be no more inauthentic than to manufacture an Eames chair.

Work duly began on a £35 million programme of repair and reconstruction, and in March 2018, the sesquicentenary of Mackintosh’s birth, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery put on an exhibition of his work as a prelude to the opening of the restored GSA. Three months later, on the night of 15 June, another fire broke out. This time the entire building was gutted, and this time the world was not sympathetic. Reservations about the art school’s treatment of the Mack over the years – suspicions that ‘the seeds of the Mack’s destruction were sown long before both fires,’ as Eileen Reid, a former head of widening participation at the school, put it in the Scottish Review – had been muted while the restoration was progressing. Now they were voiced. Listing the misjudgments and lost opportunities of more than a decade, Reid concluded: ‘The real question is, why? And why twice?’

The library at Glasgow School of Art before the fire.

Six years later there are few answers and little progress. The cause of the first fire was known from the start: a student artwork which involved expanding foam was set alight by the heat from a film projector and the fire reached the library by way of an old ventilation shaft. It’s less clear why such an obviously hazardous combination was allowed to be used in a historic building. After the second fire, a Scottish Fire and Rescue Service report, issued in January 2022, concluded that the blaze was so intense no cause could be established. Of the possibilities it ruled out all but three: an electrical fault, some form of accidental (and non-electrical) ignition, and arson. There was no explanation for the failure of the alarm system to sound, but it meant that by the time the SFRS arrived the fire had taken hold. As a consequence of this report, the GSA’s insurers were reluctant to pay out and in May this year the two parties began arbitration. A report by the Scottish Parliament’s culture committee, published in March 2019, had concluded that ‘from the evidence gathered … the Mackintosh fires raise a host of associated issues which go beyond the cause of the fire itself and as such require further examination.’ It called for a public inquiry. After the arbitration process began, the Scottish government said it was giving ‘careful consideration’ to that idea, only to announce in June that it was unaffordable ‘given the current financial landscape’.

After 2018, questions about the desirability or possibility of reconstruction were more pertinent than after the first fire, and reservations continue to be voiced, notably by the Glasgow architect Alan Dunlop, a trenchant critic of the present regime at the school. But a Strategic Outline Business Case commissioned by the GSA concluded that reconstruction was viable – the walls remain largely intact – and in 2022 the art school launched a competition for a design team to oversee the rebuild. The competition terms were criticised at the time for putting too much weight on cheapness and when the result was announced it was challenged by one of the shortlisted firms. Admitting that the process had been flawed, the GSA returned to square one. In July it appointed the Edinburgh-based architects Reiach and Hall and the conservation specialists Purcell to work on an addendum to the SOBC. Due to be published early next year, this will ‘identify the appropriate route to delivery of the faithful reinstatement of the Mackintosh Building’.

It is difficult to construe this latest move as anything other than an attempt to look busy while nothing happens and nothing is explained. All inquiries to the GSA are met with the bland assurance that ‘we comprehensively share the currently position [sic] on the Mackintosh on an ongoing basis and the most recent ones [sic] … are available on our media centre.’ As Elizabeth Davidson, senior project manager for the post-2014 restoration, points out, once the first SOBC in 2021 found in favour of rebuilding it would have been possible to secure the structure internally and remove the scaffolding, which continues to cost a six-figure sum every month (although the GSA says that there has been ‘continued reduction in scaffold’). She wrote a report to this effect but received no response. Davidson then resigned on the basis that ‘my project was no longer there.’

There is a general feeling in Glasgow that the GSA is arrogant, unable to admit that it is out of its depth in trying to co-ordinate such a complex project. Its tone throughout has been one of victimhood, as if the fires were disasters for which the school itself had no responsibility. This, combined with its seeming indifference to the effect of the situation on the city as a whole, has bred resentment. Meanwhile the Mack stands shrouded and scaffolded. The elements of the library that had been reconstructed off-site after the first fire remain in store, and among the collateral damage of the last ten years are the efforts, hopes and careers of the conservators, craftspeople and researchers who worked on the building between the fires.

Robyne Calvert, Mackintosh Research Fellow at the GSA from 2015 to 2021, is one of them. Her book was conceived as an account of the restoration process after the first fire and was intended to be published when the Mack reopened, alongside essays by her colleagues describing their work and the rebuilding process. She declines, understandably, to focus on ‘the more dissenting or contentious opinions’ about the school and the fires, but her Pollyanna-ish determination to see the upside, to find the building ‘beautiful in its new state of ruin’ and the SFRS investigation into the second fire ‘fascinating … worthy of Agatha Christie or Ian Rankin’, is grating. It would have been better not to have mentioned the failure of the fire alarm to sound than to describe this fact as merely ‘curious’. Her tone, like that of the GSA as a whole, is defensive. ‘Sprinklers are not legally required even now,’ she notes, and ‘even in its earliest days the timber-heavy Mack was perceived as high-risk,’ so perhaps it was Mackintosh’s fault it burned down.

The fourth of the eleven children of William McIntosh, a clerk in the Glasgow police force, and Margaret Rennie, Mackintosh had an unremarkable childhood. Indeed, as his biographer Alan Crawford puts it, his entire career was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current site. Such conventional origins do little to account for the astonishing originality of Mackintosh’s work, its arcane symbolism and outlandish forms, which, combined with a brilliant mastery of functional, three-dimensional space, were applied to the most ordinary urban building types: schools, offices, teashops.

Mackintosh has sometimes been cast as a tortured genius, or as a visionary pioneer of modernism, or as a prophet unhonoured in his own land. Over the years plainer truths have emerged, and Calvert’s account is for the most part appreciative but unsentimental. She emphasises the extent to which the art school was not the creation of Mackintosh alone. The job was won in competition by Honeyman and Keppie, and it was John Keppie who went to the meetings of the buildings committee. The design Mackintosh produced was calculated to meet the laconic brief for ‘a building with classrooms conveniently arranged and well lighted’. It was to be ‘plain’ and as cheap as possible. Some of the stark drama of the resulting building comes from economies forced on Mackintosh. If, as Calvert points out, there had been enough money to realise the sculptures of Palladio, Cellini and (surprisingly) St Francis of Assisi which were planned for the west façade, the effect would have been ‘less “modernist masterpiece” than “Gothic cathedral”’. It takes nothing from Mackintosh’s brilliance to note as Calvert does the influence of the Glasgow tenements in which he grew up, with their high ceilings, bay windows and brightly tiled wally close (central stairwell).

The school’s headmaster, Francis Newbery, was also an influence on the eventual design. His teaching methods emphasised that ‘students should be individualised as well as classified … the personality of the student should not be lost.’ Unlike most institutions for further education at the time, art schools had women students, and Newbery refused to have studios divided on gender lines as they were in the schools at Manchester and Birmingham. Keppie and Mackintosh resisted the idea of putting the library in the basement, moving it instead to the heart of the building so that it would be ‘more available for all departments of the school’. As well as obviously practical considerations, such as north light for painting studios, Mackintosh and Keppie improved on or introduced features including a gallery for the display of students’ work and congenial spaces for meeting ‘between the hours of study’. It was the consequent need for widely differing ceiling heights which gave rise to the balconies and entresols that always made it difficult to tell how many floors the Mack had, contributing to the impression of a building that was both rising and falling and sometimes suspended in space. The fittings and furnishings, all bespoke and to Mackintosh’s design, added to the sense of flow, to the point where, as the architectural historian John Summerson once said of the library, it seemed that if the interior were turned upside down so that the clusters of hanging lights grew up from the floor, it would have been ‘even more true to itself’.

Though designed in one phase, the school was always intended to be built in two. The east wing came first, in 1896-99; the west wing, which contained the library, only in 1907-09. By then Mackintosh was a full partner in the firm, a mature architect with an international reputation. He was married to his fellow artist Margaret Macdonald, and his friend Herbert McNair had married Margaret’s sister, Frances; together they became known as ‘the Four’. They worked collaboratively as artists and designers, and their flowing, floating style with its esoteric symbolism earned them the nickname of the ‘spook school’. When Mackintosh returned to the art school job, he took the opportunity to rework his earlier design, giving the end of the west wing a dramatic elevation dominated by three towering oriels, ‘63 feet of stone, iron and glass’ – part American office building, part Elizabethan prodigy house. It was high up behind this astonishing façade that Mackintosh placed his library.

When complete, the building was met with a critical indifference bordering on disdain. It was the crystallisation of a vision that belonged to the past, to that brief moment in the late 19th century when the Arts and Crafts movement was shading into Art Nouveau and the Victorian age was dissolving in a vapour of mysticism. When the Mackintosh emerged into the cooler light of Edwardian Scotland it looked both dated and odd. The art school’s own magazine, Vista, struggling for a positive note, concluded that it was ‘interesting’ and that this was ‘the next best thing to being beautiful’. The building was preserved largely unaltered through its first decades not because it was treasured, but because it worked.

Mackintosh himself​ did not fare so well. After 1909 his career declined. The firm had few new commissions and Mackintosh, always prone to depression, was drinking heavily. He and Margaret went on holiday to Suffolk in the summer of 1914, and the outbreak of war in August, along with other unconnected events, tipped him into accidental exile. He never returned to Scotland, and died of cancer in London in 1928. Among the peculiarities of his posthumous reputation was his absorption into an elite group of supposedly outlier architects, notably Frank Lloyd Wright and Gaudí, all of whom have more in common with their contemporaries than is sometimes allowed. In Glasgow he was appreciated only slowly and patchily. Indeed, for all his ubiquity at the key ring and fridge magnet level of Scottish culture, his home city has only sporadically celebrated ‘Toshie’. Of his designs for Kate Cranston’s several tea rooms, each one unique and fully furnished to the specification of Mackintosh and his collaborators, the World Monuments Fund notes that ‘none remain intact in their original context.’ The Ingram Street Tea Rooms were demolished in 1971, the interiors salvaged, with help from the WMF, only to remain unseen, stored by Glasgow Museums for 24 years. (The Ingram Street Oak Room is now on display at the V&A Dundee; the Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street were recently saved from closure by the National Trust for Scotland). The Scotland Street School, one of Mackintosh’s most endearing buildings, is currently scaffolded. It is supposedly meant to reopen as a working nursery as well as a museum, but there is no date for this.

Suspicions that the GSA had long lacked respect for the Mack were borne out in 2014 when, two months before the first fire, the Reid Building was opened across the street from the library. Designed by the American architect Steven Holl and named after Seona Reid, former director of the GSA, it cost £50 million. Its design was criticised from the outset as grossly out of scale. An open letter to the GSA written by the architectural historian William J.R. Curtis argued that the proposed development dominated the older building, ‘does not create a decent urban space … fails to deal with the context … is clumsy in form and proportion’ and ‘lacks finesse’. When unveiled, the ‘green giant’, as more sympathetic observers have called it, realised Curtis’s worst fears.

The Reid Building now looms over the wreck of its predecessor, while debate about the future continues, not helped by the opacity of the GSA administration. There is a wide consensus that the only way to break the deadlock is to establish a separate, independent body to oversee a project which is not only too complex for the school but has become a damaging distraction from its main purpose of developing the work of its students. Comparisons are made with France’s response to the fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, which was immediately followed by President Macron’s pledge to make the rebuilding a national project; he appointed a five-star general, Jean-Louis Georgelin, to oversee the work. While this, naturally, ruffled feathers in the Ministry of Culture, and the programme has had its difficulties and its critics, the vast project, which on any given day involves about a thousand people (craftspeople, engineers, bell founders, historians and archaeologists), is on course for the cathedral to reopen in December.

Scotland, it seems, lacks the will for any such co-ordinated effort. Niall Murphy, a conservation architect and director of the Glasgow City Heritage Trust, which project-manages major works on historic sites and would be well placed to take on the Mack, is increasingly exasperated by the Scottish Parliament’s lack of initiative, complaining that MSPs are ‘body swerving’ all attempts to break the deadlock. An exception is the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, who has campaigned energetically for a resolution. He thinks that the GSA itself might now be willing to hand over the rebuild, but fears ‘nobody has the gumption to take it on.’ As well as mentioning Notre-Dame he makes a more telling if hypothetical comparison: ‘Supposing it was Edinburgh Castle?’ Edinburgh’s history, the festival and the tattoo bring visitors from the south, while Glasgow has been ‘erased’ from the cultural landscape, Sweeney feels, since devolution.

The Mack was not the only building to suffer in the 2018 fire. The O2 ABC on Sauchiehall Street, which backs onto it, was also severely damaged. The building opened in 1875 as a diorama, and was subsequently an ‘ice-skating palace’, a circus, cinema, dance hall and music venue. When the fire came its future was already uncertain, with a contested application for demolition in place. Developers want to replace it with student flats, which have been springing up all over Glasgow. Opponents, including Murphy and Sweeney, argued for the preservation of the cast-iron façade at the very least, on the basis that the building still bears traces of its long history as a venue for popular entertainment. The SNP-led council rejected this, and the building is currently being dismantled.

Dominic d’Angelo, chair of the Alexander Thomson Society, which promotes the work of ‘Greek’ Thomson, Glasgow’s other great 19th-century architect, lives opposite the ruined Mack and watches the tourists who still file up to look at the ruin. Like Murphy and Sweeney, he sees the situation as ‘a wasted crisis’, the more so because the city has big plans, some of them with funding ready to go. The GSA could and should be central to the Golden Z, a design by Threesixty Architecture to revive and reimagine Sauchiehall, Buchanan and Argyle Streets as a cultural quarter with a lively night-time economy and a doubled population. In July a draft report produced for the City Centre Task Force painted a discouraging picture of decline and a post-Covid hollowing out of the city centre, but made constructive recommendations for improved transport, infrastructure and favourable business rates for bars and restaurants. A restored Mack would contribute to and benefit from all of those. To be visible again Glasgow needs to drop what d’Angelo sees as the naively ‘expansionist’ mindset that gave it the Reid Building and revivify its native architecture. As well as the Mack and the O2 the city has Thomson’s remarkable legacy. Yet his Egyptian Halls in Union Street, covered in scaffolding for fifteen years, are up for sale again, while the Caledonia Road Church in the Gorbals has been a burned-out ruin since an arson attack in 1965. In St Vincent Street, Thomson’s only surviving intact church, which belongs to Glasgow City Council, has been closed since a fall of plasterwork in 2021. Monuments to neglect and inertia, they are sad omens for the future of the Mack.