From Ingram Street to Renfrew Street, 1845 to 1909.

The Glasgow School of Art began under a different name. Wikipedia says the school was founded in 1845 as the Glasgow Government School of Design and changed its name to the Glasgow School of Art in 1853. Its early home was at 12 Ingram Street in the city centre, and in 1869 it moved to the McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street. The school today offers undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral study in architecture, fine art and design, and Wikipedia notes that these degrees are awarded by the University of Glasgow.

The school’s present address and its Mackintosh building arrived together. Wikipedia says work began in 1897 on a new building on Renfrew Street, on the slope of Garnethill, an area developed in the early nineteenth century. The architect was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, chosen for the commission by the school’s director, Francis Newbery, whose time in charge Wikipedia describes as a period of expansion. The building went up in two halves: one half was finished in 1899 and the other in 1909. Wikipedia credits the design to Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, working in phases between 1896 and 1909.

Dezeen reported on 30 May 2014 that the building primarily housed the school’s Fine Art department, together with a gallery used for exhibitions and for the students’ annual degree show. It is a category A listed building, according to the school statement Dezeen published on 6 March 2014. The plots across Renfrew Street were long occupied by later school buildings: the Foulis Building, the Newbery Tower and the stone Assembly Building, which houses the students’ union.

The school’s teaching is organised into four academic schools. Wikipedia lists them as the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the School of Design, the School of Fine Art and the School of Innovation and Technology, with disciplines ranging from painting, printmaking and sculpture to product design, textile and fashion design, silversmithing and jewellery, interior design, communication design, interaction design and architecture. Wikipedia adds that non-degree classes for children and adults are run under the name GSA Open Studio, and that the school is governed by a Board of Governors, which meets four times in each academic year.

A green-glass building opposite the Mack, 2009 to 2014.

The second building that now defines the school was commissioned a century after the Mackintosh Building was finished. According to the school statement published by Dezeen on 6 March 2014, an estates review concluded that, apart from the Mackintosh Building, the school’s Garnethill estate of some nine separate buildings no longer met its needs. A campus plan followed, and in September 2009 Steven Holl Architects of New York, working with Glasgow-based JM Architects and the engineers Arup, were selected to design its opening phase. Wikipedia says the commission came through an international architectural competition held in 2009.

The result is the Reid Building, named after Dame Seona Reid, who stood down as director of the school in the summer of 2013. Wallpaper*, writing on 26 February 2014, said the building would house the school’s design department and that its official inauguration was planned for that April. Dezeen reported the completion on 6 March 2014, describing a five-storey building whose matte-glass exterior stands in contrast to the sandstone facade of the Mackintosh Building across the street. It replaced the Newbery Tower and the Foulis Building but wraps around the three-storey Assembly Building.

The architects framed the new building as a deliberate reversal of the old one. Wallpaper* quoted the project architect Chris McVoy describing the Mackintosh Building as having a “thick skin and a thin frame”, made from stone and metal, whereas the Reid Building has a thin skin with little adornment and a thick concrete frame. The skin is made of semi-transparent, acid-etched glass panels with a green tint, which the magazine said is the glass’s natural colour and was kept to complement the orange-hued stone of the Mackintosh Building. McVoy told Wallpaper* that the team had pushed the technology of its day as Mackintosh pushed the craft of his, and that the Mackintosh Building was the starting point.

Light shaped the plan. Dezeen said the building has three cylindrical light shafts, which Holl calls “Driven Voids”, running from the roof to the basement, and that the majority of studios and workshops sit along the northern edge of the plan to receive steady daylight. The practice’s own description, carried by Dezeen, says Mackintosh’s handling of the building section for light inspired an approach based on volumes in different light, with offices and the refectory placed on the south side. A network of stairs and ramps, which the architects call a “Circuit of Connection”, links the lobby, exhibition galleries, lecture theatre, studios, workshops and terraces across the levels, which Wallpaper* counted as seven.

Colour arrives at the door. Dezeen said the artist and former Glasgow School of Art student Martin Boyce was commissioned by the architects to mark the entrance, and that his screen of painted steel and glass vines hangs from the ceiling. Holl described it as “a flourish of coloured glass catching and projecting washes of light”. Wallpaper* described the building as monochrome apart from Boyce’s coloured glass, and noted that a café on the third level opens onto a planted terrace looking across at the Mackintosh Building, an outdoor space Dezeen said was meant to recall the grassy machair plains found in parts of the British Isles.

Two buildings facing each other across one street.

Schools and cultural institutions carry identities that work differently from those of consumer brands. Many began with a crest, a seal or a formal Latin motto, the visual language of charters and certificates, and later added or swapped in a plain wordmark that sits more easily on a website, a banner or a tote bag. Others never had a crest at all and built their recognition on a single letter, a typeface or a set of initials.

The building often does as much work as any mark. A façade, an extension or a distinctive staircase becomes the image that photographers, students and visitors repeat, and a new wing can change how an institution is pictured for decades. Posters are a second, older surface: a steady programme of exhibition and event posters, set in a consistent grid or typeface, can define a place more clearly than its logo.

Exhibitions, catalogues, yearbooks, journals and reports extend that system into print, and each title is a chance to test the identity at a new scale. When reading these guides, look at the whole family of surfaces together: the mark, the building, the posters and the publications usually tell one story.

Fire, conservation and a decision to rebuild, dated.

The Mackintosh Building has spent much of the past decade under repair. Dezeen reported on 30 May 2014 that a fire on 23 May 2014 destroyed significant areas of the building’s west wing, including the library and a studio above it. The same report described the conservation work that followed. Staff from the heritage body Historic Scotland began working with the school on the opening phase of reconstruction, and a team from the school’s Digital Design Studio laser-scanned the western gable to build a three-dimensional record of what survived.

Stone was handled piece by piece. Dezeen said specialist stonemasons began taking down a small section of the uppermost part of the western gable for conservation, with the removed stonework taken to Historic Scotland’s depot at Glasgow Cathedral to be stored until it could be reinstated in the building. Students returned to the design and architecture buildings to finish their end-of-year shows, and fine art students were told that assessments and graduations would go ahead as planned. The school’s director at the time was Tom Inns. Wikipedia says work on restoring and recreating the Mackintosh interiors, including the library, started in 2016, using original timber species such as longleaf pine and tulipwood.

Dezeen reported on 9 August 2018 that a second fire on 15 June 2018 destroyed the Mackintosh Building and heat-damaged the rain shield of the Reid Building across the street, while the Reid Building’s interior was undamaged. The same article said parts of the Mackintosh Building had already been dismantled for safety, that JM Architects was ready to help restore the Reid Building facade, and that Tom Inns had announced the previous month that the Mackintosh Building would be rebuilt as a working art school. Wikipedia says the chair of the Board of Governors in 2018 was the writer and broadcaster Muriel Gray, and that plans are in place to rebuild the building in keeping with Mackintosh’s design.

For a design guide, the Glasgow School of Art shows an institution whose identity is carried by two buildings that answer each other across Renfrew Street: Mackintosh’s stone, finished in 1909, and Holl’s etched green glass, completed in 2014 with studios turned to the north light. Compare Central Saint Martins, another art school whose story runs through its buildings, and the Royal Academy of Arts, another institution in this collection. For this guide we use sandstone, etched-glass green and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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