In Memoriam GSA
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The images of the Glasgow School of Art going up in flames again were like a bad dream. The glowing orange inferno, caught on mobile phones, brought back memories of the fire four years ago which destroyed the most beautiful space in the building, the library, surely one of the most remarkable rooms in the history of architecture. But this time the damage has been more far reaching. It looks as if the entire interior has been gutted. The building was being restored but now seems to have been utterly destroyed. All that remains is the masonry shell which will have been dangerously damaged by the very high temperatures.
Every time I visited the Glasgow School of Art I discovered a new dimension of the work itself and of architecture in general. The library was an inspiration: the abstraction of a woodland clearing with something of the character of a Japanese temple. The exterior of the west wing was a masterpiece of ambiguities between figure and ground, space and mass. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s magisterial work, completed in phases from 1897 to 1909, was in and of itself a teaching building: it taught students to see, to experience space and light, to feel textures, colours and materials. It touched the mind and the senses of all who passed through. It rested in memory. It was high architecture but it was also casual and convivial. It encouraged the mess of creation in its studios and promoted the mixing of people on its landings and stairs.
There has been no work in the British Isles since to touch it, though there have been remarkable buildings indirectly influenced by it, such as James Stirling’s Leicester University Engineering Building, or Denys Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians in London, both of the early 1960s. In my own historical texts, I always refused to portray the Glasgow School of Art as Pevsner did, as a mere ‘pioneer of modern design’. It may have seemed in retrospect to be anticipating some features of modern architecture but it also looked sideways and back. Its contemporary cousins were works by Josef Hoffman in Vienna and Frank Lloyd Wright in the American Midwest. In British architecture one has to go back to Soane or Hawksmoor to find anything of such astounding originality, but Mackintosh’s inventiveness was rooted in a deep sense of the history of architecture. He drew on a wide range of sources, from Scottish Baronial castles, to Japanese architecture, to North American and British industrial buildings, to Michelangelo, but transformed them into something fresh and new.
