Mackintosh the innovator would have said NO to a £100m rebuild
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.
In 2018, 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 once-revered 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.
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.
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.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 19, 2018.
