Tag Archives: Fire

Insurance for Mack rebuild?

Some spectacular good news about the Glasgow School of Art, whose main building, designed by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, burned down a month ago. It seems the school’s insurance may be enough to pay for reconstruction after its recent … Continue reading

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Mackintosh fire update

The conversation in Glasgow about how to restore the school and its library has moved into a phase that pits faithful restorers against reinterpretive restorers, who presumably would want to apply their own aesthetic tics in fiddling with the work … Continue reading

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Mackintosh’s ‘modernism’

The idea of Charles Rennie Mackintosh as an early modernist may seem absurd to those familiar with his work, but a few passages in one of his lectures are surely what has given rise to such an idea. Thought to … Continue reading

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Mackintosh . . . modernist? Nah.

No sadist, I open with an image of the glorious facade of the Mackintosh Building, not with the image that has eaten away at the backside of my last several posts on the fire at the Glasgow School of Art … Continue reading

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Archives saved in Glasgow

It was a tremendous relief to learn that among the treasures saved from fire at the Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and completed in 1907, was the school’s famous archives, which contained the third largest collection … Continue reading

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Sad. Sad. Sad.

Indications are that after the horrible fire today in Scotland, the Glasgow School of Art’s famous Rennie Mackintosh Building has survived, with, as fire officials put it, 90 percent of the building structure considered “viable” and 70 percent of the … Continue reading

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Column: Driving down Market Street in 1906

San Francisco before the Great Earthquake of 1906 was a lively city, to say the least. We are lucky to have a moving picture of it from a camera hand-cranked by filmmaker Harry Miles. His Bell & Howell was on … Continue reading

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Saved: The George C. Arnold Block

I am leery of the government taking buildings by eminent domain – that is, offering a take-it-or-leave it price, supposedly “fair market,” to a building owner, who, if he doesn’t take it will have the taking done for him by … Continue reading

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