This Wednesday, the Glasgow School of Art will announce that Mackintosh's fire-ravaged art school will not be rebuilt as it was — replaced instead by a modern block behind a retained façade. We have days to stop it.
Instead of the faithful reinstatement promised five years ago, only the façade of the Mack is likely to be kept — enclosing a modern building. The double-height library, the glass-walled timber “hen run”, the studios: gone.
The decision is due to be delivered to staff — most of them away for the summer — by live stream on Wednesday morning, followed by a press release. The building, completed in two phases in 1901 and 1909, was damaged by fire in 2014 and left a charred shell by a second blaze four years later. After a long-running dispute with insurers that ended in arbitration in March, the A-listed masterpiece will undergo only a partial rebuild.
Front-page reporting: Sunday Post
It amounts to a betrayal of the Mack. Future generations will be unforgiving.
“The loss of the Mackintosh building would be catastrophic. Even a partial rebuild, or a soulless façade retention with highlights, would result in the loss of our heritage and in the further diminution of Glasgow. If you do not rebuild it as it was imagined, you lose all of its integrity — and you do nothing more than celebrate the incompetence of its temporary custodians that led to its demise.”
The board and management now making this decision are the same custodians who, campaigners say, failed to protect the Mack — twice.
Told by their own consultants to install sprinklers before the 2014 fire — they spent millions on a “visitor experience” instead.
During the rebuild, the working sprinkler system was ripped out late in the project — leaving a single watchman guarding a building site that had already burned once.
A Scottish Parliament committee found the board had not given sufficient priority to safeguarding the building. Calls for a judge-led inquiry have gone unanswered.
Now, in the most cowardly way, the same board is to declare the Mack will not be saved at all — without admitting the real reason: money they failed to secure.
“Why should they even be allowed to make this decision?”
If we lose this building now, we lose a large part of what represents Glasgow's civic footprint and Scotland's national identity.