16 December 2009: Glasgow School of Art

Completed in two stages between 1897 and 1909, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s vision for the Glasgow School of Art is arguably the best known and most widely regarded of all his buildings.

Situated in Renfrew Street in the north of Glasgow city centre, it was voted the best British-designed building of the last 175 years in a recent online poll for the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal.

This week, as part of the building’s centenary celebrations, a £100 note showing the face of Mackintosh is being projected onto the School’s west wall, along with a series of films about its history and importance.  Mackintosh was only 29 when he won his commission to design a new building for Glasgow’s Art School. The finished masterwork draws on a wide variety of influences, from the Scottish baronial style for the imposing exterior, to traditional Japanese domestic architecture for the complex interior, and continues to fascinate students of art and architecture throughout the world.

Pictured here in 1901 is a view of the School’s basement west corridor with an array of sculpted busts filling the shelves.  This is just one of a large number of archive images of the Mackintosh building held in RCAHMS collection.