Amid the meltdown of the cultural infrastructure of Scotland’s largest city – massive rent hikes at municipally owned artists’ studios, the closure and pending sale of the archive of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, the indefinite shuttering of the museum of social history at the People’s Palace, to name a few – the announcement of the likely permanent ruination of one of the major buildings of the last two centuries has passed almost unnoticed. The Glasgow School of Art building, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh between 1896 and 1909, was burned out by a fire caused by a student presentation in 2014; then, after being carefully restored, it was almost destroyed in a second, still unexplained fire four years later. Citing a lack of financial means and national and international support, the art school announced earlier this summer that it was shelving plans to rebuild the structure, and would instead focus on stabilizing the ruins until an unspecified future date when resources might be forthcoming.

Some of those who care about the building have contrasted this with the response to the 2019 fire at the medieval Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, which was painstakingly restored and reopened in 2024; but this comparison actually does Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art a disservice. Notre-Dame is a good northern French Gothic cathedral, one of many. It is neither the first, the biggest, nor the best of its genre, and the destroyed portion was a Neo-Gothic design by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect only fifty or so years older than Mackintosh. The Glasgow School of Art, by contrast, is sui generis; its standing in architectural history is comparable to that of Demoiselles d’Avignon or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – the exact moment when tradition and a leap into the unknown are balanced in one work, in which a door to the future is opened.

The building is extraordinarily rich in possible interpretations, and has generated dozens of PhDs. There is perhaps no other building in the world where you can watch a skilled, confident architect moving so far, so fast. Working first in a version of the local tradition, in a personal fusion of the aesthetics of industrial warehouses and baronial castles, Mackintosh pushed further and further over the course of a ten-year gestation, with each addition more formally inventive and spatially imaginative, until finally, in the Library Wing completed in 1909, he arrived at most of the formal principles of the modernist architecture that would come to dominate the world from the 1920s. In Reyner Banham’s twofold definition of modernist architecture – the ‘machine aesthetic’ and a ‘new sense of space’ – the School of Art’s Library Wing is, or was, a modernist building: a haunting, transcendent high room, furnished in a uniquely prophetic style somewhere between 17^th-century Kyoto and 1920s Dessau. Writing about it in the 2010s, for a gazetteer (Modern Buildings in Britain, eventually published in 2022) I could only compare the experience of visiting it for the first time to a sequence in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). In the wood-panelled library hidden deep within a space station, two lovers suddenly become weightless and float upwards among the pictures and the books to an electronic rendition of Bach. There is – was – no finer work of architecture in Scotland; there was probably no finer work of architecture in Britain.

It is alarming that even the major work of Mackintosh – one of the few architects to have reasonably high name recognition – should face such a terrible fate. But that recognition has in some ways hindered his reputation as a radical, innovating architect, putting his designs on the level of the tartans bought by distantly Scottish American tourists; the Glasgow answer to all the tams and scarves on sale in Edinburgh. Mackintosh was first ‘rediscovered’ by European architects and historians in the interwar years, but in Glasgow, a Mackintosh cult came later, as part of the city’s marketing push of the 1980s and 1990s, when it was in headlong retreat from its reputation as a bleak, grey, workerist metropolis of high-rise council flats and factories – instead rediscovering itself as, in John Betjeman’s words, ‘the greatest Victorian city in the world’. Rather than emphasizing his spaces, his ornaments and motifs became the subject of a wave of tat. Mackintosh’s distinctive quasi-organic flower motifs and abstract patterns, originally devised for wallpaper, screens and decorative touches on his buildings, suddenly appeared on thousands of ‘Mockintosh’ earrings, brooches and fridge magnets, and his spectacularly uncomfortable high-backed, abstracted furniture was put back into production. At the same time, awareness of his buildings was raised considerably, with guidebooks and tours that identified Mackintosh with Glasgow as firmly as Alvar Aalto is with Helsinki, or Antoni Gaudí with Barcelona. The comparison is logical: each was working in a big but non-metropolitan city in a manner that combined spatial abstraction and formal originality with a decorativeness, and an interest in the local vernacular, that made their architecture much more tourist-friendly than the astringency of, say, Mies van der Rohe (although among modern architects perhaps only Mies ever came close to equalling the spatial perfection of the GSA’s Library Wing).

In the 1990s, the cult went as far as creating several new-old Mackintosh buildings, a response perhaps to the small size of his oeuvre: in terms of complete, personal works that can be identified as Mackintosh’s alone, there are maybe eight or nine at most. But these have been supplemented by posthumous structures, usually built sixty or seventy years after his death, meaning that in terms of places that the public can visit, there is almost as much Mockintosh in present-day Scotland as Mackintosh. The architect’s Glasgow legacy is in a parlous state: aside from the GSA, there are two early office blocks for newspapers, the Daily Record and the Glasgow Herald. In 1999, the latter became the appropriate home of an architecture centre and gallery, The Lighthouse, but that was ‘temporarily’ closed in 2020; last year, a planning application was accepted to sell it to a tech company as private offices. Scotland Street School, with its Bauhausian glass stairwells perhaps the most clearly proto-modernist of Mackintosh’s designs, became a museum in 1990, but has also been shuttered since 2020. A proposal to turn it into an arts centre has been put before Glasgow’s planning officers, but given their current aggressive philistinism, it’s unclear whether that will happen. These interminable ‘temporary closures’ give some sense of the scale of the assault on Glasgow’s cultural infrastructure since the pandemic.

The Hill House in Helensburgh, built for a Glasgow publisher, is still open as a museum, but within a giant protective shed to shield it from the elements, as if it’s the Temple of Bassae rather than a house that is barely 120 years old. Only the tiny (partly reconstructed) Willow Tea Rooms, the similarly diminutive Queen’s Cross Church in Maryhill, and the Daily Record building are in reasonably good, accessible condition, as is 78 Derngate, Mackintosh’s extraordinary late house in Northampton, in the English Midlands. But never mind the real buildings – you can instead visit several full-scale fakes. In Glasgow there’s the House for an Art Lover, the modernist architect Andy MacMillan’s version of a Mackintosh entry for a 1901 competition, originally in the German Zeitschrift für Innendekoration, and at the University of Glasgow’s campus there’s a reconstruction of Mackintosh’s home, dismantled and then encased in a concrete cast during the 1970s by the Brutalist William Whitfield; and well outside Glasgow, in the Inverness suburb of Farr, you can visit three rather outré unbuilt Mackintosh houses, the Artist’s Cottage Project, approximated in the 1990s and clustered together as Highland holiday homes. The simulacra have almost overtaken the original.

Alongside the 1990s marketing of Mackintosh came a reassessment of his reputation as a proto-modernist. Starting with the German émigré art historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) and continued by the first major monograph, Thomas Howarth’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement (1952), the modernist version of the story goes as follows. Mackintosh, born to a lower-middle-class Glasgow family in 1868 (his father was a policeman), took night classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, joined the prolific local firm of Honeyman and Keppie, and in his work with them during the 1890s developed a local version of art nouveau, mixing its whipcrack iron lines with the asymmetrical bulk of Scottish castles, and from there explored inner space with ever more obsessiveness and originality. This gained him international acclaim, particularly from Central European proto-modernists such as the Vienna Secession and the Deutscher Werkbund; Mackintosh was invited to take part in German competitions, and his work was published widely in German. But his Glasgow contemporaries, like most Edwardian British architects pivoting towards an imperial neo-Baroque, were increasingly unimpressed. A move to London led to no major commissions, bar a single house-remodelling project for a progressive industrialist in Northampton, a startlingly original design that combined a stridently coloured, highly abstract interior with a laconic, white-walled façade. When that was ignored in turn, Mackintosh developed a drink problem and moved to southern France, where he worked as a painter; he died relatively young, and forgotten, in 1928.

For critics from the 1980s onwards, this constituted a ‘Mackintosh Myth’, a mixture of half-truths and embellishment constructed to bolster a teleological narrative of modernist progress on the continent and backwardness in Britain. But quite why Mackintosh’s trajectory comprised a ‘myth’ is puzzling, as its central tenets were all true. Mackintosh really did have an enormous effect on continental modernism, with both his spatial experiments and geometric decorative motifs echoing across De Stijl and the Bauhaus. He really was much closer to those Central European architects who did the most to create ‘the modern movement’ than any of his Scottish or English contemporaries, and he really did suffer for it – having moved to Suffolk around the start of the First World War, he was subjected to considerable harassment for his German connections (and, apparently, his impenetrable accent) and officially banned from living near the coast. And in late life he really did abandon both Britain and architecture, for a remarkable second career as a vigorously modern landscape painter, in works so strongly outlined and viscerally powerful that they suggest an Egon Schiele more interested in rocks and buildings than in the human body; ignored in Britain, they were praised by Salvador Dalí as superior to the landscapes of Cézanne. Mackintosh died in London, penniless; unbeknownst to him, an invitation had just been sent from Vienna to attend a dinner in celebration of his influence on European art and architecture. And it really is true that no other British architect excited so much interest in Europe until decades later, with the emergence of Brutalists like James Stirling.

Some of the correctives to the ‘myth’ were useful and important. They emphasized the contribution of the other members of his Glasgow clique, ‘The Four’ – designers James Herbert McNair and sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald, the latter of whom married Mackintosh and collaborated closely with him on his design projects and the decoration of his buildings. Macdonald’s work was unfairly downplayed by Mackintosh’s modernist defenders because it complicated the notion of him as a prophet of an unornamented International Style (like contemporaries such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Peter Behrens, Mackintosh never subscribed to any prohibition on decoration). And while Glasgow’s Victorian-Edwardian classical architecture was often denigrated by exponents of the Mackintosh-the-modernist thesis, scholars from the sixties onwards stressed the fact, obvious to any unprejudiced eye, that Glasgow was not a benighted industrial heap but one of the great cities of the age, whose architects had created the most decisively urban environment in Britain. There’s no reason why any of this should diminish Mackintosh’s radicalism. Macdonald’s decorative work was extraordinarily original, and putting Mackintosh back into a city whose design culture was driven by the demands of industry, especially shipbuilding, indicates how modern his milieu actually was. But for the most part, attacks on the ‘Mackintosh Myth’ by his latter-day enthusiasts have served to provincialize him.

The wave of Mockintosh, meanwhile, both benefitted and damaged the architect’s reputation. I remember someone who worked at Glasgow’s embattled Centre for Contemporary Arts asking sceptically on the occasion of the second fire, as more money was pledged to the stricken building: ‘how important is the Glasgow School of Art, really?’ I knew what he was thinking: ‘Isn’t Mackintosh the guy who designed your auntie’s earrings?’ But the Mackintosh academic industry did another kind of damage: it transformed him into just another talented late 19^th-century architect – the last of the great Victorians, according to the most intelligent of this scholarly tendency, the late architectural journalist and historian Gavin Stamp. If Mackintosh was just another Victorian, then the Glasgow School of Art was another Victorian building, and after all, Glasgow’s Victorian buildings, of which there are thousands, catch fire with alarming regularity. This devalues the architect it is trying to praise in order to settle a parochial score with global architectural history, which has always denigrated Britain as the one major European country that largely sat out the creation of a modern architecture in the early 20^th century – revisionist history as wounded amour propre. The Glasgow School of Art was a building where you could watch a transfiguration of values, a paradigm shift, an artistic revolution, taking place in real space. To believe that such shifts and revolutions are undesirable is one thing; it is another to deny that they happen at all.

The evidence has already disappeared. Of course, the funding bodies of Holyrood and Westminster are not interested in architectural history one way or another, though one wonders how differently the building might have been treated were it in Edinburgh. Seen alongside the forced collapse of Glasgow’s cultural infrastructure, the disappearance of this masterpiece could be regarded as just another insult to the artistic and intellectual self-respect of what remains, despite everything, one of the most culturally interesting and politically intractable cities in Europe. There is something uniquely appalling in the treatment of this work of world-historical significance, however, and here, more are culpable than the austerian regimes of Scotland and the wider UK.

Mackintosh’s work was comprehensively debased even before his buildings were shuttered and set ablaze. First, the Mockintosh industry transformed his designs into gee-gaws and nick-nacks; after that, architectural historians picked away at its originality and international significance and cut him off from the continental modernism that he – inadvertently, to be sure – influenced so profoundly. The likely final extinction of the Glasgow School of Art is not just a tragedy for Glasgow, but a tragedy for world architecture, a cultural catastrophe of colossal proportions – on the level of burning every copy of Jacob’s Room or slashing to pieces Matisse’s Dance: the erasure of a work of art that changed history, in a wealthy country that could easily afford to restore it, but whose rulers have chosen a bonfire of anything that happens in cities other than property development and shopping.

Read on: Johnny Rodger, ‘The Vanishing Library’, NLR 119.