Glasgow School of Art

Feel the pavement tilt beneath you. Renfrew Street climbs Garnethill at a steep angle, and the walk up from the shops of Sauchiehall Street leaves most people a little out of breath. Up here the traffic noise thins out. You hear students crossing between buildings, the scrape of a portfolio case, a bus labouring up the hill. The light also changes, because the hill lifts you above the narrow streets below. This slope is the first thing to understand about the Glasgow School of Art. Its most famous building was designed to work with this awkward hillside.

That building is the Mackintosh Building, named after its architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In the mid-1890s he was a young draughtsman at the Glasgow firm of Honeyman and Keppie. The school's director, Francis Newbery, ran a competition for a new home for the art school. Mackintosh's design won. The budget was tight, and the site was long, narrow and sloping. Those limits shaped almost everything you see. Mackintosh did not hide the problems of the site. He turned each one into part of the design.

The building went up in two phases, roughly a decade apart. The first part, including the main entrance, was finished at the end of the 1890s. Money then ran out. The western half followed in the late 1900s. In those years Mackintosh's style changed, and you can see the difference in the stone. The eastern end feels plainer and more domestic. The western end is taller, sharper and more vertical. In effect, one facade holds two chapters of a single architect's career.

Now look at the long north-facing front. The huge windows are the reason the building exists in this form. Painters have long valued north light because it stays steady through the day, without harsh direct sun. Mackintosh gave the studios enormous panes of glass facing that cool, even light. Between them, look for the black wrought-iron brackets that curve out from the stonework. They look like decoration, and they are. But they are often said to have had a practical job too, holding planks so workers could clean the glass.

This is one of the surprises of the building. People often describe Mackintosh as an Art Nouveau designer, and his curving ironwork does echo that style. Art Nouveau was a movement of flowing, plant-like forms that spread across Europe around 1900. Yet much of this building is severe and almost industrial. Large areas of plain stone sit beside small, precise details. Many architects now see the building as a bridge between Victorian craft and the cleaner forms of twentieth-century modern architecture.

Mackintosh did not work alone. He belonged to a circle of young designers often called the Glasgow Four. The group included the artist Margaret Macdonald, who later became his wife, her sister Frances, and Herbert MacNair. Together they helped create what became known as the Glasgow Style. It mixed tall, stretched figures, stylised roses and soft colours with strong geometric lines. Margaret Macdonald's role was long underplayed in popular accounts. Today historians give her far more credit for the shared work.

The heart of the western wing was the library. Visitors who saw it described a dark, tall room built almost entirely of timber. Slim wooden posts rose to a gallery. Clusters of hanging lamps filled the space like a small forest. Coloured details in the woodwork caught the light from the tall windows. For many architects, this room was the finest interior Mackintosh ever made. It held a reading room for students, but it also worked as a kind of lantern.

Then came the fires. In May 2014, a fire broke out in the building and destroyed the library. A long and careful restoration began. Craftspeople studied old photographs and surviving fragments to rebuild the room as closely as possible. That work was close to completion when a second, far larger fire struck in June 2018. It gutted the building, leaving mainly the stone shell. The second fire also spread damage to nearby properties, and it caused great distress in the neighbourhood.

So what you see today may not match the photographs in books. At the time of writing, the Mackintosh Building has remained closed since 2018, and its future restoration has been a long and public debate. Depending on when you visit, you may see protective structures, fencing or scaffolding. Please treat the site with respect. For many Glaswegians, and for former students around the world, the loss feels personal. Standing in front of the stone shell, you are looking at a building in recovery.

Now turn around. Across Renfrew Street stands the Reid Building, designed by the American architect Steven Holl and opened in 2014. Its skin is pale, translucent glass, a deliberate contrast with the dark sandstone opposite. Holl talked about the two buildings as a pair in conversation. Inside, angled shafts carry daylight down through the floors. The comparison is useful. Mackintosh used heavy stone and big windows to capture light. Holl used glass and hollow shafts. Both architects were chasing the same thing.

It is easy to forget that this is still a working art school, not a museum. Students study painting, sculpture, design, architecture and more across a campus of buildings on the hill. The school has a strong record in contemporary art. A notable number of Turner Prize winners and nominees studied here. The Turner Prize is one of Britain's best-known awards for contemporary art. That success helped give Glasgow its reputation as a city where artists can live, work and experiment.

The neighbourhood also deserves a slow look. Garnethill is a hilltop district of tenements, the tall sandstone apartment blocks that define so much of Glasgow. Many are blond or red sandstone, darkened in places by a century of city air. Look down the side streets and you catch sudden views across the rooftops. On some days the clouds move fast and the light changes every few minutes. That changing light is part of why painters have always valued this hill.

If you want to see Mackintosh's design work up close, the city offers more. Across Glasgow you will find other buildings and interiors linked to him, and his furniture and decorative work appear in local collections. Tall-backed chairs, stencilled roses and lattice patterns repeat again and again. Once you learn to recognise them, you start to spot echoes of his style everywhere. You will see it in shop signs, souvenirs, jewellery and even the patterns on street furniture.

Before you walk on, look once more at the north face. Notice how the windows hold the grey sky like empty canvases. Notice the black ironwork against the stone, and the steep street dropping away at your feet. A young architect drew this on a difficult slope with very little money. It survived more than a century, then lost its heart twice in four years. And still, students carry their work up this hill every morning... as they always have.