Charles Rennie Mackintosh is Glasgow’s most celebrated architect and designer, and his work is now admired around the world. He was born on 7 June 1868 at 70 Parson Street in Townhead, the son of a police superintendent, and trained in an architect’s office while taking evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. His life, from those beginnings to his final years in London, is told in Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
His greatest building is the Glasgow School of Art, built in two phases between 1897 and 1909. Its studios, its library and its dramatic play of light made it one of the most influential buildings of its age. Fire destroyed the library in 2014 and then gutted the whole building in 2018; the Mackintosh Building now stands as a shell, with plans in place to rebuild it.
Mackintosh worked within a close circle of artists, with his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and Herbert MacNair, known together as ‘The Four’, who developed the Glasgow Style. His work for Kate Cranston produced the most famous of the city’s tea rooms, the Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street. Mackintosh buildings describes the rest of his Glasgow work, from his first building, the Lighthouse, to Queen’s Cross Church, consecrated in 1899, and Scotland Street School, built between 1903 and 1906.
Some designs were only realised long after his death. The House for an Art Lover, drawn for a German competition in 1901, was finally built in Bellahouston Park in the 1990s. Mackintosh’s legacy explores how a designer who left Glasgow largely unappreciated came to define the image of the city a century later.
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