The court battles blocking The Mack's rebirth

The first time I walked along Sauchiehall Street after the 2018 art school fire, I had to avert my eyes. Seeing the charred wreck of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s building — the Mack — was like seeing a dead body and, reflexively, all I could do was look away. The urge to stand and stare was strong, but it felt too soon, too disrespectful.

In the six years since then, that end of town has suffered greatly. The Mack, though now bound in a mummifying protective wrap, remains a shell, and the O2 ABC venue below it — also badly damaged by the fire — is a demolition site. Sure, the Avenue Project has made the Charing Cross end of Sauchiehall Street a little nicer to walk along, but with pavements dug up at the Cowcaddens end and vacant shops dotted the whole way down, the area remains a mess.

A plan for regeneration — the Golden Z — is afoot though. With the city’s cultural institutions set to play a leading role, Glasgow School of Art (GSA) says it has an ambitious plan to put a “faithfully reinstated” Mack at the heart of it all. Reborn as a graduate school, the building will house GSA’s postgraduate students and give them space to collaborate on “internationally significant, world-leading and impactful research”. 

Inside, the Mack’s drawing studios, “the engine of an art school education”, will be returned to their original use, with all GSA students (not just those studying fine art, as was previously the case) getting a chance to use them. Workshops will be returned to their original basement location and transformed into research and development labs. Archives and collections will be displayed and made accessible to the public. Industry and third-sector partners will be given the use of the space for “creative inquiry and experimentation”. 

The whole thing will not only “empower change and create impact that is both transformative and collaborative”, but will be a “catalyst for the regeneration of Garnethill” too. It is a heady and exciting mix — and it looks almost certain never to happen.

As a cultural icon, it is hard to overstate the importance of the Mackintosh Building. It has been described by University of Glasgow cultural historian Robyne Calvert as “a monument of international significance in the history of architecture and design” and, in 2009, it trumped Cornwall’s Eden Project and London’s St Pancras Station to be named by members of the Royal Institute of British Architects as the best British-designed building of the preceding 175 years. Before it was damaged by fire in 2014, then all but gutted by a second blaze in June 2018, the Mack was not just a working art school, but also a work of art itself. Artists the world over loved it; it wasn’t just Glasgow that mourned its loss. 

Given its significance, the fate of the building has been the subject of intense public debate since that second fire. The first time around, in 2014, when the disastrous combination of a hot projector and a can of inflammable foam led to the destruction of the Mack’s west wing, there was a lot of goodwill towards Glasgow School of Art. Stars, including Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, contributed to a fundraising appeal, and the Scottish and UK governments immediately pledged £5m apiece. Together with insurance payouts that far exceeded £40m, the rebuild of the Mack was secure.  

Things have been less plain sailing since the almost-restored building was subsequently razed in 2018. That blaze was so intense that practically everything except the building’s outer shell was destroyed and, after a near-four-year investigation, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) was unable to determine a cause. The entire building, the SFRS said when it reported in early 2022, had suffered “catastrophic damage”, and “despite an unprecedented and extended investigative process” no evidence to support a “credible origin and cause hypothesis” was recovered. The SFRS said it “may alter” its conclusion “should further information be presented”, but as things stand, the official cause of the fire remains “undetermined”. 

But with no cause, there is no certainty over whether anyone should be held accountable for the fire and the insurance claim GSA is relying on to rebuild again has stalled. The art school and its insurers — a Lloyd’s syndicate managed by US firm Travelers — have embarked on an arbitration process designed to get them out of the quagmire, but with litigation relating to the claim ongoing, the end of the process is far from in sight and it appears that GSA is preparing to shelve its ambitious reinstatement plan. 

Earlier this year there was excitement when the school, which in 2023 abandoned its search for restoration architects following a botched procurement process, announced that architects Reiach & Hall and Purcell had been retained. What was never fully made clear was that they weren’t hired to work on the rebuild, as reported, but rather to determine whether it’s even possible for that rebuild to go ahead.

Working alongside a cost consultant and financial adviser, the architectural team spent July and August poring over GSA’s Strategic Outline Business Case, which was drawn up in 2021, in order to make their diagnosis. The official line from the art school is that it remains “committed to an exemplary faithful reinstatement of the Mackintosh Building” and that it will publish an updated business case for the project early next year. But a source with knowledge of the process says the team was looking specifically at whether the rebuild is viable and that, as things currently stand financially, it is not.

“It’s a feasibility project,” the source, who had sight of the documents relating to the procurement of the scoping exercise, says. “They’re looking at feasibility, viability and cost planning to understand whether, if they develop the brief, it’s viable. But the project is not viable. There is no metric that substantiates the investment.”