Glasgow (49 page)

GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART, MAY 2014
Alan Taylor

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) is to Glasgow what Antoni Gaudí is to Barcelona, and the best evidence of his genius is Glasgow School of Art. It was the result of a competition held in 1896. In the early stages of planning and construction, there was no indication, or excitement, that the building would be anything special. Local papers,
for example, were less than overwhelmed. ‘The plans,' remarked one, ‘are of the most complete description and embrace all recent ideas and improvements.' Another added: ‘The building appears to be in every way suitable for the requirements of art education.' Encouraged by the School's energetic and ambitious head, Francis ‘Fra' Newbery, who appreciated Mackintosh's talent, the result was a work of art and a place of work. Nevertheless, it took time for the ‘Mac' to become an accepted and much-loved part of Glasgow's landscape. In particular, it has an emotional bond with those who have studied in its extraordinarily beautiful surroundings. Unlike other such buildings, the School of Art has always been a building to use as well as admire. In 2014, however, it was seriously damaged by a fire which, had it not been for the swift action of firefighters, would have led to its destruction. As it was, much of it did succumb, including its wonderful library
.

A few days after the fire that threatened to reduce Glasgow School of Art to ash, I went to see for myself how bad the damage was. My trip took me up unlovely Sauchiehall Street into that part of the former Second City of Empire called Garnethill, at the summit of which, after an almost vertical ascent, is Charles Rennie Mackintosh's masterpiece. It was a morning remarkable for its dankness, the hills to the west enveloped in mist, the pavements greasy with drizzle. Access to the school's entrance was cordoned off and men in hard hats, steel toe-capped boots and fluorescent jackets hung around eating bacon rolls and slurping tea, while a photographer captured the scene. The air smelled nippily of barbecue. From the outside, the building looked to be in decent shape. Some stonework was blackened by smoke and many windows had been melted by the furnace. But to an untutored eye there appeared to be nothing that was beyond restoration.

As I looked, I was joined by a middle-aged couple. They were from Manchester, it transpired. Assuming them to be tourists, I said I was sorry they wouldn't be able to see inside the ‘Mac', as it's fondly known. ‘Oh, we know it well,' said the woman, ‘our son's a sculpture student. He's in his final year. We came for his degree show. All his work's been destroyed.' Her lower lip quivered. Shortly after the fire broke out, she added, her son had called home, weeping copiously, in part because of the loss of his work, but also because of his fear for the future of the place where he had spent much of the last four years. Now he was in limbo, not knowing when or whether his degree might be awarded; and, if it was, what kind of a degree it would be.

There was not much I could say by way of consolation. In the hours after news of the fire broke, I heard from many people who had either
studied at the Mac or taught there, or who simply loved the building, recognising in it that which is inspirational and irreplaceable. Rare for such an institution, it was open to the public and one often wandered in, marvelling anew at Mackintosh's inventiveness and thoughtfulness. What made it particularly special was its functionality, its user-friendliness, its ergonomics. It was designed not as a museum piece or a showcase but as a workshop which was to be subject daily to wear and tear. My daughter was a student there and whenever I visited she would take me on a tour, acting as if she were the chatelaine of Balmoral Castle. Others of its tenants said it was like being given permission to use a Ming vase in which to display daffodils or to have a Meissen porcelain plate on which to eat baked beans.

There was always something outside or inside the building to please the eye. No matter where you turned, it seemed that Mackintosh, who designed it in the first decade of the twentieth century, had anticipated your gaze and offered you the wherewithal to satisfy it. From the mullioned windows one could look across the urban sprawl of Glasgow to the countryside beyond. The internal perspective was no less beguiling. Everything in the Mac was designed by Mackintosh himself: light fittings, bookshelves, easels, rattan-cover chairs, magazine stands, desks and clocks. Even his rather Presbyterian basement lecture theatre drew admiration. Panelled with stained timber, it has long been the bane of students, most notably the narrowness of the benches on which they sat, leading some architectural historians to surmise that a century ago students' backsides must have been rather leaner. An accomplished artist himself, Mackintosh knew instinctively what was required. For him natural light was as essential as oxygen is to a scuba diver and it pours in at every opportunity. But equally important were private spaces, nooks and crannies and window seats where one could read and think and daydream free from interruption.

By common consent, the school's library was Mackintosh's
pièce de resistance
. I say ‘was' because it is no more. Situated on the first floor, it must have been directly in the line of the flames, and while the firefighters arrived within four minutes of being summoned they were unable to save it. I remember it well. My friend Dugald Cameron, the Mac's erstwhile director, was ever eager to show it off. Dugald had been a student before he became a member of staff. As with Mackintosh, drawing is at the heart of his art. On our strolls he'd stop and examine a student's work, pointing out where it was on course or where it was going awry. Dugald draws trains and planes in forensic detail. His equivalent of Michelangelo's
David
is Concorde's engine or the Flying Scot's, and he brought to his exposition of Mackintosh the sensitivity of a Glaswegian
whose memory of the heyday of the Clyde and its throbbing shipyards is still fresh. With Dugald, one is reminded that art schools are not just about turning out Turner Prize-winners, but also the designers of useful – and beautiful – objects and machines.

It was in the ‘wondrous' library, Dugald recalled, that forty-five years ago he first met his wife Nancy, who had joined the school's staff as a librarian. Spatially, it was small, but it never struck me as such. Rather, as the editors of the Glasgow volume of
The Buildings of Scotland
series point out, the double-storeyed room had ‘a decidedly Japanese character'. In less accomplished hands this might have felt fey or affected or pastiche; in Mackintosh's, the perfection of the proportions, the attention to detail and the play of light and dark make it the kind of place in which the drudgery is taken out of study. ‘This is justly considered one of the finest rooms in Glasgow',
The Buildings of Scotland
editors concluded.

That it is no more is cause for national lamentation. All, however, is not lost. While the earliest generations of students never learned the name of the person who designed the building to which they were attached, that has not been the case for several decades. Consequently, the Mac and its furniture and fittings have been photographed endlessly and Mackintosh's drawings are all said to be extant. Once the insurers have examined the contracts, administrators will know how much money they have to begin the reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Scottish and British governments have indicated that they are ready to help when required.

What no one can say, though, is how long it may take to recreate what Mackintosh achieved in a few astonishing years and what fire destroyed in a matter of minutes. When I was told what had happened, I recalled the weekend I spent with the sculptor Kenny Hunter – a graduate of the Mac – at Maryhill Fire Station in the north of the city. He'd been commissioned to produce a sculpture of firefighters and had embedded himself with a number of them, the better to understand their job. It seemed like a good idea for a newspaper article and so I allowed myself to undergo some basic training and don a uniform. Glasgow, I soon discovered, is a highly inflammable city, especially on a Saturday night. Kenny's sculpture, which is called
Citizen Firefighter
, now stands outside Glasgow Central Station, in salute to those redoubtable men and women who take the heat on our behalf.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN, 24 JULY 2014
Hugh MacDonald

When the 2014 Commonwealth Games was awarded to Glasgow one thing was certain, that spectators and participants would receive the kind of embrace unique to a city which prides itself on wit and irreverence
. . .

The city of Benny Lynch, the haven of the eternal wee man, has always punched above its weight. Glasgow last night took a small budget and came up with a big idea.

It is what Scots do. The land that brought the world penicillin, television, the square sausage, the Enlightenment, slagging as a way of declaring love, the novel, ships that sailed the world, quips that nailed the moment, modern engineering, the carry-oot and the philosophy of economics, toyed with the idea of a conventional opening ceremony in the way that Jim Baxter once played with an English midfield. It then gave it a body swerve.

Glasgow 2014 came up with a move that burst the net at a packed Celtic Park. It asked for financial generosity and matched that with a generosity of spirit that is part of the Scottish DNA. Arms of more than 40,000 spectators were raised inside the stadium, with mobile phones providing a glittering mosaic. Numbers were texted inside the ground and across the globe. Each message pledged £5 to Unicef, which had come together with Glasgow 2014 to save children's lives across the world. Early figures indicated that more than £2.5 million had been raised.

This spirit of charity was complemented by the themes of reconciliation with an imperial past and the promise that no one should fear a Scotland of the future. The most dramatic articulation of this act of faith came from Pumeza Matshikiza, the South African soprano whose rendition of Hamish Henderson's ‘The Freedom Come All Ye' would be seen both as a hymn to liberty and an acceptance that the more sinister history of the Commonwealth has to be confronted before it can be consigned to the past.

There was the heady glamour of celebrity inside Celtic Park, but there was also sobering sentiment too. Billy Connolly, the greatest comedian in a city teeming with them, devoted his appearance to recalling the Clyde-built link forged with Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter.

This, then, was an opening ceremony that was not content to entertain. It had a message of Glasgow gallusness and an undeniable theme
of freedom from poverty, from illness, from the lingering fall-out from history. And it had Caledonian ambition. In the manner of John Logie Baird, Alexander Fleming, Sir Walter Scott, David Hume and Adam Smith, it sought to change the world.

A budget of approximately £20 million – about a quarter of that at the fabulous London Olympic ceremonies – was spent on a party that threatened to put the K of kitsch into kulture and kliché. But it all succeeded, though the Duke of Wellington, sitting in statue in the stadium with the mandatory cone on his head, might have observed: ‘It was a damn close-run thing.' An early profusion of kilts, sporrans and Nessie was in danger of also putting the K in kringe. It was lightened by a self-deprecatory irony that saw cans of Irn-Bru holding up the Forth Bridge, a scattering of outsized Tunnock's teacakes littering the ground, and shortbread standing for the Callanish Stones.

John Barrowman, the darling of international audiences, was joined by Karen Dunbar, whose sincerity of welcome was moving, as was, oddly, the section that owed most to Danny Boyle's London extravaganza: the glimpses of the shipyards and their workers caused a craving for the Scotland of full employment and multiple trades.

The ceremony blossomed into something irreverent but strangely wonderful with Amy Macdonald kicking off a raucous ‘Rhythm of My Heart' with a series of unlikely accompanists, including Rod Stewart. There was even a ballet version of The Proclaimers' ‘I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)', stepped out in front of the screen that stretched so far it would have taken even Usain Bolt ten seconds to race across it.

There was also Susan Boyle reprising ‘Mull of Kintyre' and Nicola Benedetti giving the world a version of ‘Loch Lomond' that would have brought a tear to a moneylender's eye. The energy was raised further by Andy Stewart, resurrected from The White Heather Club, singing its eternal theme of ‘Come In, Come In'.

Brilliantly and dramatically, it was turned into a soaring chorus by use of the mash-up. People of a certain age may regard a mash-up only as a process that requires potatoes, a large dollop of butter and a pummelling, but it became something breathtakingly modern and extraordinarily powerful.

The teams entered to a tumult behind Scottish terriers. Their owners lifted the odd reluctant pooch who had discerned almost immediately that a circuit around Celtic Park constituted a lot of Scottie steps.