Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art

In 1897 the Glasgow School of Art ran a competition for a new building on a steep site on Renfrew Street. The budget was small for the size of the brief and several established practices declined to bid seriously. The winning drawings came from the office of Honeyman and Keppie, and the work behind them was done by a draughtsman in his late twenties named Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His name was not on the submission.

The building went up in two phases because the money arrived that way. The eastern half opened in 1899 and the western half, including the library, was finished ten years later. Between those two dates his design thinking changed a great deal, which is why the two ends of the building do not match and why that mismatch is interesting rather than a flaw.

What the building actually solved

An art school needs north light, large volumes and cheap construction, and the site fell away sharply to the south. Mackintosh put enormous studio windows across the north front, ran the plan along the contour and let the south and west elevations do something else entirely. The result reads as a functional workshop from the street and as something much stranger from the lane behind. Very little of it is decoration applied to a structure.

The interior fittings are where the reputation sits for most visitors. Light fittings, balustrades, door furniture and the great timber library were designed by the same hand as the plan, in a vocabulary of thin verticals, squares and sparse stylized plant forms. Francis Newbery, the director who ran the school and pushed the project through, gave him room to do this. Without that client the building would have been ordinary.

Mackintosh was not working alone. He belonged to a group known as the Glasgow Four, with Margaret Macdonald, who he married in 1900, her sister Frances and Herbert MacNair. Margaret Macdonald collaborated on interiors and panels throughout his career and he said in writing that she had the talent and he had the training. That contribution was played down for most of the century and has been reassessed seriously in the past thirty years.

• The competition was held in 1897 and the design was credited to the practice rather than to him
• The eastern phase opened in 1899 and the western phase was completed around 1909
• The library, with its exposed timber structure, belongs to the later phase
• Margaret Macdonald collaborated on interiors and decorative panels across the career
• The Glasgow Four exhibited in Vienna in 1900 at the invitation of the Secession
• Two fires, in 2014 and in 2018, gutted the building and a rebuild is still under way

The Vienna connection is worth taking seriously. The Secession invited the Glasgow group to exhibit in 1900, the reception in Austria was far warmer than anything they had at home, and Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstatte took ideas directly from what they saw. A Scottish architect who could not get much work in Britain became a reference point in central Europe within a few years.

The career after the building

It did not go well. Commissions dried up after 1910, he left the partnership, moved to Suffolk and then to London, and the architectural work effectively stopped. He spent the 1920s in the south of France painting watercolors of towns and flowers, and he died in London in 1928 with almost no reputation. The revival began in the 1960s and has not slowed since.

Those late watercolors are the part of his output a collector can realistically approach, and they are stronger than the story of a failed architect suggests. The drawing is hard, the color is flat and deliberate, and the buildings are constructed rather than sketched. Tate holds one of them, a view of a French village called Fetges. Furniture attributed to him is a much riskier field, because reproductions have been made continuously since the 1970s and some of them are very good.

A building designed by a junior employee whose name never appeared on the drawings can still be the only thing anyone remembers about the practice that submitted them.

LaArt editorial note

The 2018 fire destroyed what the 2014 fire had left, including the rebuilt library, and the argument about how to reconstruct it has run ever since. The drawings survive and the building was documented in enormous detail. What cannot be rebuilt is the timber that a joiner cut in 1909 to lines a draughtsman set out on paper twelve years earlier.