Things we found in the fire: Glasgow School of Art’s restoration brings surprises
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Version 0 of 1. A Roman sentry stands watch with a look of panic, as fireballs crash down around him and bodies lie strewn among the rubble in the last moments of Pompeii. The scene, depicted in Edward Poynter’s painting, Faithful unto Death, is still legible on a scorched postcard pulled from behind the charred remains of wooden panelling in the Glasgow School of Art last week. It was found clinging for safety with a newspaper cutting from 1909, the year the building opened – and it couldn’t be more apt. Standing in the burned-out wreck of the renowned Mackintosh library, where the symphony of cabinetry has been reduced to blackened brick walls and a few charcoal stumps, it looks as if Vesuvius could easily have erupted. Almost one year after flames engulfed Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece, destroying students’ work moments before the degree show and leaving the world’s architectural community speechless, as if they had lost a dear old friend, work has just begun on the problem of how to rebuild it. Half of the building survived unscathed, but the rest will require repair. However, the biggest question hangs over what should become of the hallowed gem of the library, regarded by many as one of the most important interiors of the 20th century – which the school has vowed to rebuild exactly as it was. The eyes of the world are watching: even Brad Pitt has been roped in as a fundraising ambassador, to help reach the £35m target. “It’s like dealing with a precious text,” says David Page of Page\Park architects, the conservation practice charged with the daunting task of reconstruction, as he stands in hard hat and high-vis, a fluorescent sliver of hope in the blackened scene. “This was Mackintosh speaking to the world. Now we need to piece his message back together.” The months since the blaze have seen a healthy and heated debate, staged in public forums and the press, on the right way forward. Some camps see a duty to rebuild an exact replica; others believe such an act to be a Disney-like betrayal of an architect who himself was radically modern. “[Mackintosh] was driven by a lifelong search for new forms in architecture and technology and was never a copyist,” says Alan Dunlop, a Mack alumnus and professor of architecture at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. “I have no doubt that he would reject the approach of building a replica.” Julian Harrap, the conservation architect responsible for the acclaimed reconstruction Neues Museum in Berlin with David Chipperfield, which favoured a measured combination of restoration and bold new insertion, also thinks now is the time for bravery. “The Mack really has to be bold because the library was not properly being used in the years running up to the fire,” he said. “The institution needs a vision for how the library can once again become a symbol of Mackintosh and of the city, and I believe that involves avoiding simplicity and avoiding the idea of a replica.” Anyone who visited the building as a tourist might have felt uneasy as the sacred library was opened up for the tour, then swiftly locked shut after they left. Indeed, even students were only allowed into the holy of holies for half-a-day a week. This sense of preciousness has already infected the new studio building across the street, where students have been told not to affix anything to the gleaming white walls, in order to keep architect’s “driven void” light-wells sacrosanct. They’ve retorted with a bold poster campaign: “Steven Holl’s perpetually blank canvas: who are we preserving this space for?” However the famous library is rebuilt, will it ever be more than a shrine to the ghost of Mackintosh? Tom Inns, the school’s director, is unclear of its future role. “It had gone beyond a library,” he says. “We now have a functioning library elsewhere, so the space will be used as a vessel for creativity – for students, but also for the many other public audiences the art school caters to.” And will the door still be locked? “The key was lost in the fire,” he says, “and we might not put it back.” He is adamant that they are determined to rebuild the structure as faithfully as possible to the original. It is the right thing to do – particularly because, remarkably, all the information required to do so exists. Luckily for the architects, the library was one of the most documented spaces in history, with original construction drawings, a complete set of measured drawings taken in the early 1990s and countless photographs, including the Guardian’s own 360-degree interactive panorama. But despite the thorough records, the fire revealed a number of surprises. “With Mackintosh, you expect it to be amazing craftsmanship,” says Page. “We had always assumed, for example, that the great timber columns holding up the mezzanine, which really defined the room, were carved from single pieces of oak. But the fire has shown them to be nailed together from a few lengths of pine, then covered with a thin facing plate.” “It’s basically like a shop fit-out,” says Ranald McInnes, head of heritage management at Historic Scotland, picking at the charred nails that now protrude from these black stumps. The Kauri pine, from which the columns were built, was a cheap ballast material, he says, brought back in boats from New Zealand and readily available at the Glasgow shipyards. It has since become a protected species, so there are now questions over what to use instead. Wouldn’t Mack’s joiners just head to the nearest builders’ merchants and see what was going cheap? It’s not quite so simple. The genius of the School of Art, and many of Mackintosh’s other works, is the combination of off-the-peg materials with things that have been exquisitely crafted. On the one hand, he specified timber “from the saw” and plaster “from the float”, while on the other he was constantly on site, breathing down his workers’ necks, insisting that the ends of steel beams be carefully stripped and twisted into impossibly elaborate decorative curls. As project manager Liz Davidson puts it: “He was a magician. He created magic out of base materials.” So can the magic be restored? In their entry to the competition, Page\Park undertook a forensic deconstruction of a single bay of the library, examining every joint and unpicking the tricks of structure and ornament that Mackintosh deployed. They’re confident they can remake it all. But there are questions about the finish. Photographs from 1909 show a much lighter tint to the wood than the dark treacly stain most will remember. If it’s rebuilt anew, it could have all the atmosphere of a freshly fitted MFI kitchen. “It will feel new, but the patina will come with use,” insists Page. “We have to build up from the base blocks – strip it back and then allow the clutter to develop. We shouldn’t force it into the image that we remember.” And what we remember isn’t necessarily what Mackintosh intended. The great vertical windows, for example, which run up the western elevation like a trio of crystal chimneys, were replaced in 1947. Mackintosh had designed horizontal casements with a more Japanese feel – so which is the more “truthful” to restore? Similarly, his vision for the whole school was never completed. There are a couple of empty niches in the entrance, where others are filled with decorative mosaic; is now the time to fill them in? Such questions remain to be answered. The inferno, for all its horrendous destruction, has also provided an opportunity. The fire suppression system – which was tragically almost complete before the blaze, but delayed by the discovery of asbestos – will be finished, along with services threaded through newly exposed ducts and voids. The notoriously leaky north-light studio windows, ravaged by the flames, will be replaced with versions that hopefully keep out the drips. But above all, the school should have the confidence to reinvigorate the building as what it was always meant to be: a working art school. Muriel Gray, chair of the board of governors (who has vowed that her first act will be to re-carve the naughty graffiti she engraved into the library woodwork as a student) has stated that the school of art “will die if it becomes a museum”. And Liz Davidson is frank. “We’re going to rebuild it all with extreme care,” she says, “then hand it over to the students to treat with extreme irreverence.” |