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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Willow Tea Rooms, opened in 1903, are a must-see destination in Glasgow. There\u2019s a house that reconstructed the interior of the house where he and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (also an artist), lived. The Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow and the V&A Museum in Dundee have reconstructed rooms and large collections of his work. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, he\u2019s venerated for the completeness and intensity of vision of what a built space should be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public apotheosis of this is the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, designed and built from 1897-1909. It\u2019s a little like the original dome building of John Hopkins Hospital\u2014a visual symbol that was also where everything happened. (Two of the pictures below are of models.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2014, the building suffered a fire accidentally caused as an art show of graduating students was being set up. As it happens, the fire happened while I was on my first walk in the Challenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I stayed in a hotel one block away for two days making the final preparations. I didn\u2019t have time to tour the inside of the building, and in truth had only just learned about Mackintosh before I left. When I came back two weeks later streets were blocked off and the city was still in shock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I came back the next year, this is what the building looked like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2015<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2018, as the building was near the end of a $33.5 million restoration a second fire happened that was far worse than the first. Whereas 60 percent of the contents were saved after the first, everything on the inside was destroyed in the second. (More than 6,000 tons of debris was removed over the next few years.) Worse, the building–which is on a hill–had structural damage. The downslope facade had to be stabilized and a tower taken down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is what it looked like a year later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n As one would expect, there’s been a lot of haggling with insurance companies and with the company doing the original restoration. (The cause of the second fire hasn’t been determined.) The insurance settlement is now in arbitration. About $22 million has been spent since the second fire. No work to speak of has been done in eight years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the way it looked in 2024 when I was last here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hadn’t thought much about the Mackintosh Building in the last two years and was interested to see the progress when I got here. I was surprised to see there was none. The only thing different is that the plastic covering blew off in a storm and was replaced only on the roof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mackintosh is a \u201cCategory A Listed Building,\u201d which means it can\u2019t be torn down without government permission. In any case, the GSA says it still wants to restore the structure. Estimates for that are at least $140 million, and maybe twice that amount. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I walked up to the building just after nightfall my first night here. A janitor named David, who\u2019s worked there for 24 years, was smoking a cigarette outside the Reid Building\u2014a modern building opposite the Mackintosh in every way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201dI\u2019ll be in the ground before that ever gets done,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2018ll never get done. There\u2019s nobody that\u2019s got that kind of money.\u201d He said he has a friend on the work crew who told him the rental of the scaffolding alone costs a million pounds a year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then he added: \u201cIt\u2019s only a building.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Notre-Dame in Paris is only a building, too. But it had God and government on its side; the Mackintosh has only art and a university. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, art marches on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I went into the Reid Building the next day. The school\u2019s museum was closed, but a show of student works from a silversmithing course was up. It was full of delicate, hand-wrought things that I suspect Charles Rennie Mackintosh would have liked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Glasgow is a little like Baltimore. It has a great industrial past, much of it involving shipbuilding, now gone. (In the19th and 20th centuries, one -fifth of the world\u2019s ships were built on the River Clyde, which runs through the city.) It has a huge and distinguished medical school (University of Glasgow, established in 1751 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scotland-7","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5503"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5642,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions\/5642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"