Days ago, a spectacular symbol of civic pride was hoisted above the River Clyde. It was The Glasgow Rose, a 32ft-wide public art installation designed to ground visitors to the Commonwealth Games in a sense of place.
Here they were in Scotland’s largest city – birthplace of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the tenement boy who revolutionised modern design and became the nation’s undisputed titan of architecture.
Conceived as an instantly recognisable tribute to his genius, the rose was suspended from the giant arm of another urban icon – the hulking Finnieston Crane, pictured right. It was an inspired marriage of the creative and the industrial, both key strands in the story of the city itself.
It made for smashing photographs too – a slam-dunk publicity coup which allowed civic Glasgow to bask in the reflected glory of its globally renowned visionary.
Nothing seemed more fitting than wrapping the city in the memory of Mackintosh as it strove to put its best foot forward on the world stage.
Except for one astonishing detail: less than a mile away from the spot where tourists now bag their pictures of the rose, the architect’s defining work is quietly being consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) was a 12-year project perfectly mirroring Mackintosh’s rise from obscurity to mastery.
Completed in 1909, it was his ultimate artistic statement – a tour de force in which he designed everything from the structural walls right down to the light fittings and door handles.
The Glasgow Rose should be a symbol of pride… but masks a darker truth
Not for nothing do modern architects consider it as Scotland’s Notre Dame – a talismanic cultural heritage landmark which ranks among the most important buildings in the UK.
There is, of course, another vivid association with Notre Dame. Both buildings have suffered catastrophic blazes. Indeed, it happened to the GSA twice – in 2014 and 2018.
Ten months after that second fire in Glasgow, the roof of the Paris cathedral was engulfed in flames, its signature wooden spire reduced to cinders.
It seemed the whole of France watched in horror and mounting despair as TV cameras captured the grim images of their sacred building burning.
It was a time for leadership and the leader led. ‘I say solemnly tonight: we will rebuild it together,’ declared
President Emmanuel Macron in a live address from the cathedral’s courtyard even as smoke billowed behind him.
The following day, he set a timeline of five years. In the event, it took five years, seven months and £590million to complete the job.
Visiting the hollowed-out GSA on the morning after the blaze, the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon could hardly have found a more defeatist tone.
She said the building may be beyond repair; that it might be fit only for demolition. If it could be saved, well, the Scottish Government would support that.
There was no declaration of intent. There was no national restoration mission. There was no leadership.
Paris spent five years marshalling 2,000 artisans to rebuild Notre Dame with the nation’s president as the project figurehead.
‘Scotland’s Notre Dame’ has been a burnt-out shell for more than eight years – a depressing monument to inertia, clad in scaffolding and white plastic sheeting. It was four days before that Commonwealth rose was winched into position over the Clyde that Scotland learned something of the future for the architect’s ruined masterpiece.
The School of Art as it burned a second time
A full restoration would cost £265million and was therefore beyond the means of its owners, the School of Art itself.
But there could be a partial rebuild. The scaffolding could come down and the façade could be retained. So this was to be the fate of Glasgow’s beloved ‘Mack’ on Renfrew Street: a future of curated decay; a surrender of national heritage to balance sheets.
Incredibly, this was greeted as a ‘milestone’ announcement by Katerina Brown, chief executive officer of the Historic Environment Scotland quango.
First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish Government would ‘engage constructively’ with the GSA.
‘We will work closely with them and other partners …’ lobbed in Culture Secretary Màiri McAllan.
The sense of bureaucratic detachment could hardly have stood in starker contrast with the words of President Macron seven years ago.
Scotland stands ready to lose its greatest architectural treasure with barely a whimper of demurral from our party of government.
Little wonder the cries for it to get involved – to lead – are becoming deafening.
Simply, if the building is an iconic masterpiece of national and international importance, the Scottish Government cannot sit back and reflect what a pity it is that its owners can’t afford the restoration. To do so is a fundamental dereliction of duty to the nation’s heritage.
That point is surely implicit in a manifesto statement from the newly-launched campaign Rebuild The Mack.
‘In Scotland, we have a clear systemic problem with how we treat our heritage and we must learn from these failures,’ it says.
It adds: ‘The idea of the Mack “partially rebuilt” in some modern, shoddy way, is an obscenity. Would the French have accepted some half-a***d pre-fab solution at Notre Dame?!’
The obvious answer is no – and the obvious next question is why should Scots be prepared to settle for it?
The SNP brands itself as the natural custodian of Scotland’s future and yet baulks at its responsibilities as custodian of Scotland’s past.
Mackintosh was a genius, but his legacy has been traduced by Scotland’s rulers
REMINDERS of these responsibilities are now coming thick and fast from the worlds of art and architecture. While there is criticism, too, of the GSA’s inexpert stewardship of an eight-year impasse mired in legal and insurance disputes, the clear message is that Holyrood’s hands-off approach is no longer acceptable.
‘John Swinney needs to step in to rescue the Mackintosh building,’ art critic and curator Clare Henry told The Sunday Post.
She added: ‘The Scottish Government should declare that the Mack is a key building for Scotland and an international treasure, and that its future can no longer be overseen by the Glasgow School of Art.
‘It’s impossible and unreasonable to expect one person to run both an art school full of students and a historic iconic architectural masterpiece.’
In a joint statement, the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and the Royal Institute of British Architects echoed her sentiments: ‘A building of such national importance requires a national response if future generations are not to curse us for its loss or mutilation.’ The two bodies called for leadership from both the Scottish Government and Westminster.
Meanwhile Andy Scott, a GSA graduate and creator of the Kelpies sculptures near Falkirk, said: ‘I hope I am right in sensing a groundswell of opinion now that might just force some to finally act who thus far seem to have been either unable or unwilling to do so.’
It is not as if the SNP was unaware of concerns about the GSA’s custodianship of the building. As far back as 2019 Holyrood’s culture committee found the owners gave insufficient priority to safeguarding the building from fire before the 2014 blaze.
A £36million restoration was almost complete when the building went up in flames again. This time the fire caused even more extensive damage, wiping out the ABC music venue on Sauchiehall Street.
It, too, now stands as a derelict eyesore – a decomposing carcass on Glasgow’s most famous thoroughfare, backing on to the shrink-wrapped remains of Scotland’s most architecturally important building.
Compare and contrast this unholy mess in the heart of the city – the lethargy, the apathy – with the ‘can-do’ spirit of the French, determined that their stunning cathedral would rise again.
Here we leave our stricken buildings to rot – abandoned to gather graffiti on the hoardings erected around them, to sprout weeds and trees on their roofs and crevices.
Driving past this dismal scene last year the Paisley- born broadcaster and commentator Andrew Neil described Glasgow’s equivalent to Oxford Street as a ‘shambles’, a ‘disgrace to Scotland’s biggest city’ and a ‘national scandal’.
Who could disagree with his assessment? In a nation so fiercely proud of and – insistent on – its distinct identity within the UK, and in a city centre so richly endowed with architectural heritage, where is the pride that will not tolerate its disintegration?
It should be front and centre in both national and local government and yet is scarcely discernible in either.
While SNP ministers strive to stay out of the crosshairs in the Mack debacle, city councils in both Glasgow and Edinburgh preside over empires of decay.
Behold the once magnificent People’s Palace in Glasgow Green – a shuttered and structurally compromised husk with water ingress and extensive plaster damage. A £36million refurbishment was supposed to ensure a grand 2027 reopening. That has now been delayed indefinitely.
Cross to the capital and find Westfield Court in Gorgie – among the first council-owned multi-storey blocks ever built in the city and currently being considered for listed status.
The council remains the factor – but residents say it is such a neglectful one that it would rather knock the building down than pay for repairs.
Meanwhile, fresh fires have turned magnificent city centre edifices into disaster zones – blackened teeth in a ruined smile. The latest one, three weeks ago, was on the site of the former Debenhams store on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.
The one before that, Union Corner in Glasgow – the very gateway to Central Station – will remain derelict until at least 2030/31, council leader Susan Aitken admitted last month, due to its complex ownership structure.
A ‘meanwhile use’ is currently under discussion. This, of course, is what the city already expects. In modern Scotland a half-decade of emptiness and inertia is no longer an institutional failure; it is a design concept.
It is against this backdrop that anger now intensifies over the Mack – the sheer insouciant preparedness to let things drift, to accept defeat.
We rightly consider the repair cost of this building in the light of spending splurges the Scottish Government was quite ready to lay at taxpayers’ door.
It is only a little bit more expensive, for example, than one eight-years-late and vastly over budget CalMac ferry that doesn’t sail yet.
But we should also consider the French funding model for the Notre Dame restoration.
A few well-chosen words, delivered at the right time by a statesman, turned a national disaster into a global fundraising effort almost overnight.
Ultimately it raised the equivalent of £800million from 340,000 donors across 150 countries. That left the restoration £110million in surplus – money which can now be used to preserve the cathedral for future generations.
No such brainwaves in Scotland. It’s not only a dearth of pride in our buildings which afflicts our political establishment. It’s a dearth of imagination, of gumption, of acumen.
Perhaps Mackintosh would have been the least surprised of all.
The devastating irony is that, in his own lifetime, he was dismissed by the establishment and effectively frozen out of his home city through institutional rejection.
He died in London, almost penniless. Now, even as a giant homage to his most enduring motif is raised over the Clyde in the hopes of marketing Glasgow to tourists, the establishment insults him again.
‘Scotland, at its worst, can be world class at trashing our heritage while branding and monetising it,’ the leading architect Malcolm Fraser tells me.
The Scot, one of the key figures behind the Rebuild The Mack campaign, adds: ‘Edinburgh has long realised that its built heritage is so breathtaking that it can afford to build in and around it [the] cheap, bland and shoddy.
‘But Glasgow, after generations of diddy “Mockintosh” flowers, is, post-fires, way past the tipping- point. With the Mack a ruin, the red flower can only bring shame.’
He continues: ‘As an architect I get a few comments about how a rebuild is a distraction from forging a new Scottish architecture; or how a rebuild, in modern style and perhaps around a rebuilt library, might be an inspirational thing.
‘My heart quails at an arrogance of architects squabbling over the right to debase the ruins of Mackintosh; and, given the paucity – fushionlessness is the guid Scots word – of contemporary Scottish architecture, what would be more useful than anything for us is the Mack example, renewed and in front of us, of how to advance tradition and modernity, and gravity and light.’
The word ‘fushionless’, by the way, is defined as spineless, spiritless, lacking in substance or devoid of energy or vitality.
Mr Fraser suggests it describes our modern architecture.
I would suggest that, in this sorry tale, it applies much more widely than that.
