GLASGOW has not always done what it could to protect its architecture. Buildings by Alexander Greek Thomson have been demolished or neglected. The M8 was allowed to slice the city down the middle. And the brutal high-rise mistakes of the 1960s are only now being pulled down and replaced with something that people can learn to love and live with.
So what are we to make of the plan to build a block of student flats right next to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art – is this the city up to its old tricks again? The building that is currently on the site, a pub and nightclub, would be no great loss to architecture, but according to Professor Anthony Jones, a former director of the Mack, allowing the student flats to go ahead as planned would be like stabbing Mackintosh in the front.
It is dramatic language but the proposed student accommodation is on a grand scale, sitting on Sauchiehall Street and rising up Dalhousie Street to stop right next to Mackintosh’s famous building. Professor Jones says the plans are monolithic and are very badly scaled. “I can’t actually believe they are planning to do this,” he says.
The problem is that appreciation of a building is not a science, and there were many who questioned the scale and style of the extension to the art school on Renfrew Street, which opened in 2014 and sits right across from Mackintosh’s original. It was only when it was finished that a consensus emerged that it was a dramatic modern classic.
Any building that sits right next to the Mack has to be created in a similar spirit, which does not necessarily mean it has to be small – far from it. But it cannot be pedestrian or monolithic, which means a rethink on the student housing is required. There is no reason why a huge building cannot go up on this site, but it must also aim high - it must be created in the spirit of a great innovator and stylist like Mackintosh.
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