Before the advent of North Sea oil and gas, native talent was Scotland’s greatest export. The diaspora of the country’s population to the four corners of the globe, not least during the Victorian era, far surpassed the million who emigrated from Ireland during the Potato Famine: engineers, bankers, traders, administrators and industrialists, some of whom also became great philanthropists; Andrew Carnegie, for example.
So, too, in culture and the arts, and especially in architecture: whether the Adam brothers, Robert and John, in the eighteenth-century, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, in the nineteenth (through his campaign against Ruskin), and James ‘Big Jim’ Stirling and Basil Spence in the twentieth. But the most original was Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), so long feted as a designer of furniture, printed fabrics and interiors, and only much more recently for his architecture. As so often is the case, it took a major retrospective exhibition of his work, at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow, and then the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1996-97, to rediscover and redefine this legacy.
The same happened with the reputations of Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), again in New York, in 1978, and then in London, in 1981, with an exhibition at the V&A designed by Piers Gough; and the touring Sir Basil Spence (1907-76) exhibition in Edinburgh, Coventry (home of his competition-winning design for the Cathedral, 1957-62) and London, at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
This month sees the opening of the latest show, Mackintosh Architecture, at the RIBA’s Architecture Gallery.
It seems as though the architect neglected us, his neighbours south of the border, almost entirely, or was it the other way round? He built nothing in London, alas, and very little in the rest of England. In fact his strongest link with the capital is that he died here, forgotten, destitute and alcoholic, at the age of 60, after coming and going to France to try and cure his ill-health for fifteen years. His studio house was at 48 Glebe Place, off King’s Road.
Born and bred in Glasgow, then the second city of the British Empire, he was apprenticed to local architects at the age of sixteen and soon came to prominence for his draughtsmanship, attending evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, later named the Mackintosh in his honour. Most of his greatest work is to be seen locally: the Glasgow Herald Building (now The Lighthouse), Scotland Street School, The Hill House, Queen’s Cross Church and Windyhill. Undoubtedly his masterpiece was his own competition-winning design for the new Glasgow School of Art, built 1898-1909. His Library extension, a huge cliff with three 8m (25ft) high oriel windows, was badly damaged by fire last year but will be restored.
Unusually, many other works were built posthumously: The House for an Art Lover (1901) built 1990-92, was one. This very substantial building was valued, on completion, at less than one of his original armchairs which was sold for £300,000. Far more remained unbuilt than built. Whereas his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he is often compared, designed around 400 buildings, Mackintosh only had 14 to his credit.
The architectural historian, James Stevens Curl, describes him as primarily “an Arts and Crafts designer who used Art Nouveau decorative devices”. That said, those who seek influences often find Scottish Baronial and Scottish vernacular; Celtic; Japanese; Adolph Loos; Frank Lloyd Wright; Russian Constructivism; Dutch de Stijl; and the paintings of Klimt. Eclectic he may have been, but he made them all his own.
But like another Scottish architect, Barry Gasson, whose design won the competition for Glasgow’s Burrell Collection in 1972, he eventually gave up due to the dearth of architectural commissions, and focused on his other artistic work instead. (If memory serves me correctly, Gasson took up dairy farming).
The other remarkable thing about Mackintosh was the international reputation he enjoyed as a designer during his own lifetime, while largely overlooked in England. Through publication in The Studio, his work was well-known to the avant-garde in Austria, Germany and America. He exhibited, and was published, in Paris, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Turin, Venice, Budapest and Moscow.
Still, architecture is very much the focus of this exhibition, even though most of it is confined to the years between 1896 and 1909. It is the result of four years of research by Professor Pamela Robertson and her team at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. It comprises more than 60 original drawings, watercolours, perspectives; a model, film and photographs of details at the school, two animations and a poem. The Arts and Humanities Research Council was the principal funder.
Mackintosh Architecture opens on 18 February (until 23 May) at the Architecture Gallery, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD. Open 10am until 5pm Monday to Saturday, and to 8pm every Tuesday. Closed Sundays. Free. Also visit www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk and www.glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian
Britain’s first Mansion Tax
When Goethe visited Andrea Palladio’s house in Vicenza as part of his Italian Journey (published 1816-17) he was surprised by its modest scale: it was so small it only had two windows. But then as an architect (let alone the most influential architect of the sixteenth century) the artisan earned little more for his design and supervision skills than he did as a stone-carver.
In Britain, in 1696, William III introduced a tax on the number of windows in a house, which he thought would be more palatable than an income tax. This “tax on light and air” was the origin of the term ‘daylight robbery’.
It was repealed in 1851, sure enough soon after income tax was introduced. But the results are still with us: look at any house either pre-dating 1696 or up until 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace, and there’s a good chance some of its windows will have been bricked up, often permanently. Now you know why.
For the asset-rich but cash-poor residents of Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster, woe-betide the enthusiasm of both Labour and the Lib-Dems for what is, it seems to me, the politics of envy hung over from Old Labour. Former New Labour cabinet minister, Peter Mandelson, is against the Mansion Tax and for practical political if not personal reasons. He gets my vote on this one.
Talk to me
“I have a theory about social media: that it exists not because people are dying to share everything but because of poor urban planning. The reason these channels have developed on the US west coast stems from millions of people being lonely and trapped in sprawling suburbs. Apparently the Swiss are among the lowest users of social media in Europe. I’d venture that this is due to village life, good public transport and a sense of community.”
Thus wrote columnist Tyler Brûlé in the Weekend Financial Times last month. Hear, hear!
Just like the introduction of earlier technologies: telephones, trains, cars and more recently the Internet; new modes of transportation and communication have ensured not that people are better connected but quite the opposite: they have made living apart easier.