‘Future generations will curse us for its loss’: can nothing save Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh’s masterpiece?
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- Glasgow School of Art announced that a full "faithful reinstatement" of the 1909 Mackintosh building would cost £265m — four times previous estimates and five times the school's annual turnover — and admitted it cannot fund the project alone.
- GSA outlined an interim strategy of stabilising the burnt-out shell and removing the external plastic shroud and scaffolding to reveal surviving stone walls, with stabilisation costs understood to be covered by a recent insurance settlement reached through arbitration.
- RIAS and RIBA issued a joint statement welcoming the interim plan but insisting "faithful reinstatement should remain everyone's preferred outcome" and demanding leadership from the Scottish and UK governments to secure resources for full restoration.
- Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, writing in the Architects' Journal, argued for a joint-venture partnership approach, calling on Scottish and UK governments to treat the restoration as a national project.
- The Mackintosh building suffered its first fire in 2014 when an aerosol canister ignited at a student show; after a £35m restoration, a second fire gutted the structure weeks before completion in 2018.
- Architect Gordon Gibb, a former GSA lecturer, warned that any partial rebuild or facade retention would cause loss of heritage and integrity, saying it would "celebrate the incompetence of its temporary custodians."
- The article cites Berlin precedents — David Chipperfield's Neues Museum and Norman Foster's Reichstag, which retained Soviet graffiti — as models for mixing new and old fabric, while stressing Mackintosh designed the building as a Gesamtkunstwerk down to its door handles.
Why it matters: The Mackintosh building is widely regarded as Scotland's finest piece of architecture — the article compares it to Gaudí's Sagrada Família and Notre Dame — yet a £265m price tag, five times the school's annual turnover, puts a faithful restoration beyond the institution's reach. With insurers having settled and professional bodies demanding national government intervention, the decision now sits with Holyrood and Westminster, while an interim stabilisation leaves the building's long-term fate unresolved more than a decade after the first fire.
