A planned reconstruction of the Glasgow School of Art — a Charles Rennie Mackintosh masterpiece that is one of Britain’s most celebrated buildings but was ravaged by fire eight years ago — is up in the air after its owners said on Wednesday that they could not afford to fund the project alone.
Rebuilding the school in line with Mackintosh’s designs would cost 265 million pounds, about $355 million, the school said in a news release. That is “an amount that is not affordable and which would compromise the financial sustainability of the organization,” it said.
For now, the school said it planned to remove scaffolding that has shored up the building since the fire and install an internal support system. But that will not return Mackintosh’s gem to a working condition, and the school would need external funding to do more.
Neil Baxter, an architectural historian and former lecturer in architectural history at the school, described the building as being “of the greatest world importance,” and said, “The Scottish government should step up, and if it can’t, the British government should step up.”
Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, has promised to deliver growth in every area of the country, not just London. But he has little money to spare and Britain’s economy is in the doldrums.
Màiri McAllan, the Scottish government’s education and culture minister, said in a statement that her “clear preference” was for a faithful rebuild. The school had not requested any public funding, McAllan added, but she said the government would “work closely with them and other partners to help secure a prosperous future for this iconic building.”
Mackintosh, a Scottish designer and architect, completed the Art Nouveau project in 1909, and critics eventually came to regard it as his masterpiece. In addition to being a working art school, it was visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year, especially to see its startling library with modernist lighting reminiscent of factories, and ornate carvings that evoked Italian landscapes.
The school’s alumni include several winners of the Turner Prize, the major British art award, as well as members of the Scottish rock bands Franz Ferdinand and Travis. Mackintosh also attended the school, where he met his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald.
A fire destroyed much of the building in 2014 after an overhead projector ignited solvent in a student’s art project, but an insurance payout allowed its restoration. However, in June 2018, just as that rebuild was coming to an end, another fire destroyed the building.
After that blaze, Penny Macbeth, the school’s director, said in interviews that the school was “committed to the faithful restoration” of the Mackintosh building. “It can’t be a pastiche. It can’t be a halfhearted attempt. It has to be done brilliantly,” she told The Times of London in 2024.
But when investigators failed to find the fire’s cause, the school became caught up in a dispute with its insurance company. The two sides entered a confidential arbitration process that ended this spring.
On Wednesday, the school released a document updating the costs of rebuilding the school. It did not detail the insurance settlement, but said that “a range of factors, including construction inflation, market volatility, economic pressures and changes in the financial position of the higher education sector” meant that a faithful reconstruction was not possible.
The report says that the school could look to the British government to pay for the rebuild, but that it may need to be the anchor project of a wider regeneration program in Glasgow in order to qualify for the funding.
Gordon Gibb, a former director of professional studies at the school’s architecture department, said that another organization “needed to take over” the restoration of a major piece of Scotland’s heritage.
“This is a building that influenced world architecture and changed Victorian traditionalism into modernism,” Gibb said. “We have detailed records of every part of it,” he added, “so it should be brought back.”
The Scottish architect Ian Ritchie said he found it unthinkable that “the promise to rebuild is now questioned because of money. As a nation, we have an obligation to rebuild it, with the same materials.”
Officials at the Glasgow School of Art did not immediately respond to an interview request, but Ann Priest, the chair of the school’s board of governors, told The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, on Wednesday that any eventual rebuild would not “be an exact historical return” to the school’s previous form.
“We can’t go back to that idea of what people are holding in their memories,” Priest said. Any revamped building would need to comply with contemporary fire safety standards and accessibility requirements.
“It needs to be slightly different to be as inspiring and as visionary as Mackintosh actually made it,” Priest said. “We must go forward and make it live for the future.”
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