The future of the architecturally illustrious centerpiece of the Glasgow School of Art—designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and completed in stages between 1899 and 1909—is uncertain after the school said planned renovation work following two fires is too expensive to undertake on its own.
After a fire in 2014, actors Brad Pitt and Peter Capaldi led a fundraising drive to restore the building. But another blaze in 2018 did further damage that was deemed “exceptionally significant,” according to a BBC report tracing the timeline of what Stuart Robertson, the director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, described as “like déjà vu.”
But after the settlement of a years-long insurance claim, the Glasgow School of Art calculated the cost to reopen the building as £265 million (around $355 million) and said, in a press release, the “scale of such a project would be beyond the capacity and expertise of the School and, despite reaching a positive settlement with insurers, the funding gap is significant due in large part to the rising costs of construction projects.”
A report in the New York Times quoted Neil Baxter, an architectural historian and former lecturer in architectural history at the school, saying, “The Scottish government should step up, and if it can’t, the British government should step up.”
Màiri McAllan, the Scottish government’s education and culture minister, vowed to “work closely with them and other partners to help secure a prosperous future for this iconic building.”
The Times said the Art Nouveau building, widely considered Mackintosh’s masterpiece, “was visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year, especially to see its startling library with modernist lighting reminiscent of factories, and ornate carvings that evoked Italian landscapes.”
The paper added that Ann Priest, chair of the Glasgow School of Art’s board of governors, said that early discussions with Scottish and British government officials about potential approaches to funding the building’s restoration “have been supportive and incredibly positive.”
