The Glasgow School of Art Centenary
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Greatest Architectural Design Celebrated
Nov 11, 2009
The Glasgow School of Art is regarded as an architectural masterpiece. It was recently voted the best British building of the past 175 years in a poll organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Mackintosh won a competition to design the school, at which he had recently been a student. Sited at the edge of a steeply sloping south facing hill, it stretches along an entire block, facade to the north.
The arrangement is an E-shape with corridors which link large studios along the street and offices and supplementary rooms to the back, while at the east and west ends are larger rooms, most significantly the two storey library on the west. The entrance is located on the north facade, slightly off centre, and leads to top-lit studios above and below as well as an impressive display of classic sculptures (originally used in anatomical drawing classes) and bright ceramic mosaics stark against white walls.
This fundamental part of the current art school campus was built in two phases. Charles Rennie Mackintosh completed the smaller East Wing in 1899, then his greater design for the West Wing Library and his innovative interior detail took a further decade to realise. The style of this building and its interior is confusingly credited with being modernist, arts and crafts, art nouveau, early art deco and Scottish baronial.
Relationship to the Arts and Crafts Movement 1850-1915
- Medievalism especially in the Gothic references and heavy oak furnishing in the library, which would not be out of place as a scriptorium in a monastery
- Handwork or an illusion of such – copper and brass, pierced woodwork, stained and leaded glass
- Repetition of plant motifs such as buds and flowers, especially the rose
- Conceptual integration - interior designed with exterior as Morris and Burges had done in classic houses such as Knightshayes Court at Tiverton, Devon
The Arts and Crafts movement was heavily nostalgic in its obsession with handwork rather than engineering, always looking to the past for its mood and motifs. CRM did not see why he should desert the ‘Scottish baronial’ architectural style so prevalent across Scotland from the 18th century. On the north facade he incorporated a tower into the asymmetrical entrance, and massive stone masonry supports oriel windows on the end of the building. Within however it is neither as moribund nor florid nor dark as Pugin, Burges et al.
Relationship to Art Nouveau 1880-1914
- Orientalism – Japanese form reflected in elongation e.g. in the cabinets and suspended conundrum of box-like lights in the library
- Floral art nouveau motifs and geometric motifs in the iron work and details - stylised stems and buds as opposed to naturalistic ones in Arts and Crafts
- Vertical lines and height, such as in characteristic Mackintosh chairs and the enormous windows
- Stained glass detail with florid curved edges and the jewel colours typical of Art Nouveau in furniture doors and panels
Art Nouveau is the first new decorative style of the twentieth century, marked by international interest and influences, and ends with the collapse of the Vienna Secession in 1914. Conceptual integration becomes more extensive, applied to every detail of a creation, even with matching jewellery and cutlery, and it is marked by its application of new technologies to decorative metal and glass. It incorporates industrial innovation such as electricity and is incorporated into modern urban systems like underground railways.
Relationship to Modernism 1860s to 1970s
The Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art is now referenced as the first modernist building in Britain, though the genius of Mackintosh and his fellow pioneering 'Spooks' was not recognised in their lifetime. Modernism's dates incorporate all the previous art and design movements mentioned, but then all were concerned with debating relationships between style and ideology, and with considering how, in the industrial age, to use design to express truth, self, meaning, and purpose.
Modernism famously dictated that architectural form should follow function, a precept that Mackintosh incorporated here with continuing success. While aspects of this great building appear complex, even fussy, bare white corridors and expanses of studio walls, geometric grids of massed windows and rectilinear grilles on streetlights, and startling brightnesss of natural interior light connect to modernist principles.
For some years 'the Mack' has operated partly as a museum to Mackintosh, as have several other buildings in the Glasgow area, yet still it retains its primary role as functioning teaching and studio space. In 2008 the doors opened on the new Archives and Collections Centre. The Centenary on 15 December 2009 also celebrates the completion of the £8.5m Mackintosh Conservation and Access Project, a massive project of refurbishment and restoration, with an exhibition of 1909 student art.
A World History of Architecture (2004) Marian Moffett, Michael W. Fazio, Lawrence Wodehouse
Art Nouveau (2002) Klaus-Jürgen Sembach
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