In 1896 the Glasgow School of Art held a competition for a new building on a brutally steep, tight site on Renfrew Street, with a budget its director cheerfully called only enough for ‘a plain building’. The winning entry came from Honeyman & Keppie — drawn by a junior assistant not yet thirty, a former evening student of the School itself: Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
It was built in two campaigns as money allowed, and the gap made it two masterpieces in one. The eastern half of 1897–99 is taut and inventive — vast studio windows hung with ironwork above a sober sandstone base. By the time the western half rose in 1907–09, Mackintosh had grown into full command: the west façade’s three sheer oriel windows, dropping sixty feet down the cliff of Scott Street, are among the most original elevations of the twentieth century, and critics have long called the building Europe’s first truly modern one — while its maker insisted it was also deeply old, rooted in Scottish castle and tower.
Inside, everything was designed — light fittings, clocks, the carved newels of the ‘hen run’ corridor — and it culminated in the Mackintosh Library of 1909: a hanging forest of dark timber, coloured balusters and cascading lamps, regularly judged the finest room in Scotland. Crucially, the building never became a monument: it stayed a working art school, paint-spattered and alive, known to every student simply as ‘the Mack’.
That life is what made the catastrophes unbearable. In May 2014 a fire beginning in a basement degree-show preparation destroyed the library and the west wing’s upper floors; a £35 million restoration had nearly finished when, in June 2018, a second fire gutted the entire building to a shell — its cause never determined. Both events are told fully in the Famous Disasters section.
The School has committed to a faithful rebuilding, arguing that Mackintosh’s drawings, the salvage archive and the experience of the first restoration make an authentic return possible — a project of many years that has become, in effect, a test of what Glasgow is prepared to do for its greatest building. The Mack, twice lost, remains the city’s most loved absence.