IN March 1940, Glasgow School of Art knew there was a widespread public impression that it was the sort of place where bright young things could spend their time in a pleasing and not too exacting fashion.
The director said the school had to disabuse people of the idea that it was full of long-haired, bearded, rather dirty young men, and charming young women who were simply amusing themselves. The chairman of the governors insisted there was no educational establishment in the city where the work was approached more seriously or carried out more earnestly.
That month, the school’s centenary was marked in this paper, it having been established in 1840 as a Government School of Design (though the GSA website puts the founding date as 1845).
The “massive castle which broods over Renfrew Street” was one of the country’s finest buildings, we wrote. Mackintosh’s name was writ large both in the “combination of strength and decorative grace which is its exterior and in the simplified nobility of its halls and passages and rooms with their plain wood and stonework ... the forthright squareness of their huge windows repeated in a hundred variations of iron grilles, wall-plaques, ceiling lights and even in the few original chairs and tables which student heels and elbows have left intact.”
Sadly, however, some experts now say that the much-loved facade of the Mack may have to be pulled down after last Friday’s fire.
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