Why I wept for the Glasgow School of Art when I heard of the fire
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Version 0 of 1. The Glasgow School of Art is still standing. Set as it is on a hill, now blackened by the fire that ravaged it on Friday, it's still a place of dreams. It has always had a particular hold over those who studied there, not only through its remarkable physical presence but also as an idea. The powerful emotional outpouring in response to the fire is enough to tell us that. In 1950, when my father walked through its asymmetric entrance for the first time, he entered another world A postwar grant to assist working-class students had brought him there. For a boy who had been brought up in Port Glasgow in the depression, he carried his hopes with him. As Christopher Frayling once said: "It is the only art school in the world where the building is worthy of its subject... a work of art in which to make works of art." I enrolled as a student in 1983 and I felt as though my life had begun. I would study drawing and painting there for five years. Walk through the foyer of the "Mac" (as anyone who has ever studied there calls it) and there is an irresistible urge to look up to the light above. What fills your vision is a glorious network of oak beams that draws you up the main staircase to some of the most celebrated painting studios in the world. To this day, I have never painted in a studio that bettered the one I worked in at the Glasgow School of Art. "You couldn't think of any way to improve them," my father exclaimed as we shared a tearful telephone conversation on hearing the news of the fire. He's right, of course. Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect, but he was also an artist. He understood what an artist needs. A place in which to think and in which to imagine. He created an artistic masterpiece. His obsession with detail led him to design every item in the building meticulously. From a humble stool to an easel (so good they were often smuggled out of the building) or a light fitting, all possessed both beauty and utility. Would any other architect have thought to include the dark booths that lined corridors along the spine of the building? I know I wasn't the only student, wounded by a bad critique of their work, who often sheltered in one. Those of us who studied within its hallowed walls knew it was special, but we took the genius of Charles Rennie Mackintosh completely for granted because the building lived and breathed its purpose. We adored and abused it in equal measure. It was a building in which we were encouraged to think about the world and our place in it. We graffitied its walls, dressed up its plaster casts, hung from its balconies and clambered on to its roof but, most importantly, we worked there. And long before it was seen as a museum or a place of reverence, the brilliance of Mackintosh's design encouraged us to work hard. His idea of the Glasgow School of Art, and ours, lives on. Alison Watt was associate artist at the National Gallery in London (2006-2008) |