Date

1975

Author

Aslanoğlu, İnci

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Glasgow School of Art and Architecture is one of the two schools of architecture active today in Glasgow.Founded by the government in 1840, in an effort to enhance the quality of mass-produced goods in this heavily industrialized city, the School has since functioned as an institution for teaching architecture and different branches of art such as painting, sculpture, graphics, poster and industrial design and ceramics with a craftsmanly approach . A graduate of this institution, the author Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is among the founders of 20th Century art and architecture at the turn of the century. He had a manysided personality: he was an architect,interior decorator, painter and a very able draughtsman. The Art Nouveau movement which came as a protest against historicism and the corrupt Victorian style, in the 1890's, found its best expression in Mackintosh's interpretation with emphasis on the abstraction and rectilinearity of forms. This attitude of his would eventually lead to the rational and functional Bauhaus design approach. The School was started to be built in 1897 after a competiton. First the east wing was finished. The west wing took two years from 1907 to 1909 to be completed. The lapse of years between the two ends manifests itself in a change of style. In fact, the differences in the treatment of four facades are the natural outcome of the different functions they have to serve. On the 'E' formed plan the studios are placed on the North to get the favorable North light. Their windows with large sizes, almost dissolve that facade into a glass wall. This practice was very daring at the time. 'Function' was taken as the starting point of the whole design, with its simple and straightforward treatment free from any period styles or historical elements. The flexibility in the studios is another of the innovations seen in early 20th Century architecture. The vertical grouping of rectilinear forms is the main characteristic seen in the west wing where the library is situated. The library which has been accepted by some architectural historians as a peak in its interior space arrangement, has the same rectilinear quality of forms, made up of rectangles and squares. With this library Mackintosh is thought of as the counterpart of F.L.Wright in Europe. Here,double beams carry a gallery overlooking the reading room. The interior decoration, furniture, even the hanging lamps have the same horizontal and vertical arrangement of forms one finds in the structural system inside the library. Forms free from superfluous curves, straightforward and reduced to their basic minimums, only governed by their function, are characteristic of the whole building from the exterior to the inner treatment, the furniture design, even to the easels in the studios and the exterior ironwork. The building does not represent Art Nouveau architecture as has been stated so far, but Art Nouveau is detectable only in small details such as the keystone above the north entrance, architraves of the east and west doors, small openings with stained glass, or in some details of the ironwork. But above all else, the building has a significant place in the history of architecture because'function' is the keyword to the whole design where the plan is expressed and is readible on the exterior. These were the qualities rather rare to find in the early years of the 20th Century.

URI

http://jfa.arch.metu.edu.tr/archive/0258-5316/1975/cilt01/sayi_1/23-30.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/51429

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Department of Architecture, Article