CONTEXT 189 : SEPTEMBER 2026 5 Glasgow School of Art has announced that a full rebuild or faithful reinstatement of the burnt-out Charles Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow School of Art building, while remaining a long-term ambition, would cost more than it can afford, so for the moment it is stabilising the building’s shell and removing external scaffolding. Here are some reactions, mostly on LinkedIn. ‘IS IT MACKINTOSH if it isn’t Mackintosh? If it was a sculpture or a painting and half of it got damaged would we restore it? Would it still be the artwork by the dead artist?’ Keith Winter ‘ISI METZSTEIN once said to me the Mack was the only building he knew that you entered in the middle… in both plan… and section. A lesson in architecture in so many ways.’ Phil Coffey ‘“CURATED decay” could be the solution but who has the nerve? The National Trust’s plan for Clandon caused much grinding of conservative – as opposed to conservation – teeth.’ Gillian Darley ‘BACK IN 2009 we at the RIBA Journal marked the 175th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects by assembling a team of judges to determine what they reckoned was the best building of that timespan… ‘We devised a longlist of 49 buildings – seven each from the seven quarter-century periods from 1834 to 2009… The winner? Both the public and our panel of judges agreed: it had to be Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, then happily still fully intact.’ Hugh Pearman ‘ON THE DAY we learn that Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art may be left indefinitely as a mere facade, we make a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s extraordinary 1935 Fallingwater… ‘Probably impossible to live in, a heritage conservation nightmare (terraces have been stripped back to re-bar and post-tensioned, glazing replaced three times, furniture is re-finished annually) and anachronistically intrusive to its natural setting, it remains a wonder. FLW’s genius is just so revitalising. So would be a restored Glasgow School of Art!’ Ben Derbyshire ‘THE COMPARISON with Notre Dame shames us, as France’s most cherished building burnt one year after our second fire, but is now gloriously rebuilt, while the Mack still stands as four gaunt walls round a sepulchral void… ‘The idea of the Mack “partially rebuilt” in some modern, shoddy way, is an obscenity. Would the French have accepted some halfarsed pre-fab solution at Notre Dame? The Mack has remained, throughout its long life, a beautiful, vibrant, living and working resource, and it would constitute a massive act of cultural selfmutilation to turn away from the generational duty to ensure a full rebuild… ‘There is no better recorded, debated and understood building in Scotland, and we know how to rebuild it – a company of joiners had already completed the rebuild and install of the beautiful library after the first, and before the second fire, and have let it be known that they could easily and quickly rebuild again.’ Malcolm Fraser and Johnny Rodger writing on https://rebuildthemack.com ‘THE BUILDING can not be replicated or reinstated. A building completed in 1910 would not meet today’s building standards. Mackintosh’s masterwork is gone forever. The things that made it brilliant and a Category A building were the flow from the steps right up into what was the foyer space and then from there on into the upstairs exhibition space. ‘The main access stairs throughout the building were at either side of the long rectangular open corridors. And the access stairs at the end were open, completely open, and had double height spaces in them. These are the things that made it really quite a significant building, quite beautiful, but would be impossible to do with today’s building regulations.’ Alan Dunlop in Glasgow Architect ‘IF YOU do not rebuild it as it was imagined, you lose all of its integrity – and you do nothing more than celebrate the incompetence of its temporary custodians that led to its demise.’ Gordon Gibb, quoted by Catherine Slessor in the Guardian Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building in 2009, before its devastation by fires in 2014 and 2018 (Photo: Jorg Bittner Unna, Wikimedia)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=