Facing up to Mackintosh

MECHANICAL WHIRRING

"What do you build opposite an architectural masterpiece?

"Discuss."

Hopefully another architectural masterpiece!

Well, you've got a choice haven't you?

You either do something that's totally deferential

and just kind of cowers under the presence of-of greatness,

or you have a go.

That energy and effort and fear that you hope the architect has

when he starts to try and build a building

opposite a building like this,

you know, that's got to be a recipe for, you know, energy, at least.

And, hopefully, if you mix that with great skill

then you get a great building.

I've worked in really sick buildings,

I mean, places where not only is it not inspiring,

it just makes you want to end it all,

and it's quite hard to analyse

what it is that's wrong with it.

You think, "What's wrong with this space? Why is it so depressing?"

What you're asking now is what is it that creates place out of space.

Yes.

So, what gives it an identity that makes you want to go there every day,

and work and talk to people and ignore them or hide,

-and that kind of stuff, and be yourself.

-Yes.

And I suppose any building that does that

has to be thought through, be very complicated and very simple

-at the same time. So it has to be very articulate.

-Yeah.

And that's what...

Mackintosh - example of good.

Other buildings - examples of bad,

because you just don't want to be in them.

I distinctly remember the experience of going into the building,

going up the lift, along a corridor, through a door,

along another corridor, into another door

until I eventually ended up, in the tiny, cramped little space

that was my working environment, with a slit window

on to the alleyway out the back.

So you totally kind of...

I actually had a mental image of myself as being

like some kind of a rodent in an experiment,

in this kind of rabbit hutch.

Now, I know that some students were, er, sad to leave the Newbury,

and sad to leave the Foulis.

We had a party.

And we had cleared out both buildings so that people could

write graffiti on the walls.

A lot of the graffiti was about the fondness

that people had for those buildings.

In many cases, not really fondness for the buildings per se,

but fondness for the experiences and the enjoyment that they'd had

in the buildings while they were studying there.

Although it had to go. There's no question, it had to go.

No, no, you're right, yeah.

But when I saw that big sort of mechanical dinosaur

eating it for breakfast one morning,

there was a slight element of... A little tear came to me.

At the time, I thought,

"Oh, no, this is terrible,"

but I know now that was just a sentimental reaction.

What do you think of the new Steven Holl building?

I've seen the plans and sections, and models,

artists impressions of the spaces,

and the studio spaces look brilliant.

They made huge effort to create energetic, great spaces,

and they've made a huge effort to make the most out of light.

It should be an exciting building.

And it's got that route through it a bit like the Mackintosh building.

The first years start at the top,

and then you kind of work your way down,

-so every day you're going past all the other departments.

-That's good.

Our original thought was, in developing that site,

was actually that we would pull down the students' union.

And it was Steven Holl, the architect,

who proposed that we actually keep the building

because he didn't want to have a kind of modern building

facing off the Mackintosh building.

He's very respectful of the Mackintosh building

and he thought to have a completely contemporary, matt glass building

facing a stone building would just be almost an aggressive act.

I kind of like the way that it sort of puts pressure

on that piece of street.

I think it makes it really interesting.

It's a kind of canyon feel about it,

it's really like a squeeze coming down

and I think it's quite exciting.

It's a bit like that sort of Wall Street,

City of London financial services district.

Yeah, I mean, they're squaring up to each other a bit...

-Yeah, full on.

-You know, the two buildings are sort of...

You know, I wouldn't say growling at each other,

but they're certainly not trying to get off with each other.

SHE CHUCKLES

-And I think that's good.

-I think that's good, though,

-I think it would have been very wrong if they did.

-Yeah.

It's not that kind of a building.

What do you think of the Mackintosh Building?

I still think the Mack is amazing.

I mean, it does have a sort of magic about it.

It's really unlike any other kind of space

and, although it's a big building, it's got a lot of different things

going on in it, you know, that I think

are really dynamic and stimulating still.

There is something about it that is more than the sum of the parts.

It's something slightly ineffable.

I think that the Mackintosh building works well,

because there's a lot in it, there's a lot to rub up against,

lots of different materials, it's got a kind of patina of age.

So it's not like a new car where you're terrified of scratching it

cos you're the first person to occupy it

and there's a burden of responsibility to use it well.

We used to just use it un... completely unselfconsciously.

I think the people who do work here, they don't think,

"Oh, my God, it's a great building, I mustn't touch it."

But it's got lots of little nooks and crannies,

different kinds of space, light space, elevated space,

space that's subterranean.

So, depending on what kind of person you are or how you're feeling

or the kind of the thing you're trying to do,

there's nearly always a space you can go to.

You've got choice.

And it's got big social spaces, it's got quiet spaces...

I just think there's an awful lot in it.

It's a really complicated building for something that was

so inexpensive and built of actually quite humble materials.

There's nothing expensive about the materials that were used in it.

But a lot of effort put in it as well, bits of decoration,

the metalwork - simple things are done well. It's really structured.

Maybe he just understood what was important

and what was important in creativity then, you know, at the turn

of the last century is still what's important.

I think absolutely.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS

"What should an Art School building provide for its students?"

And it says "discuss".

-SHE LAUGHS

-Oh, yeah?

I haven't been asked to discuss anything for years! "Discuss".

Well, what do you think?

What should it provide for students?

I think it should provide a space that's...

inspiring but neutral at the same time, if that's possible.

And that's what Mackintosh definitely did with the main building,

cos it's both brilliantly inspiring,

but it doesn't impose its own aesthetic on you.

And it's a place for meeting other people, so you didn't really

learn as much from the tutors as you did from your fellow students.

Oh, absolutely. That's always the case at an art school.

And it was brilliant - so you'd go into a studio

and there's 30 students there or 15 or whatever it is

and somebody's playing the guitar and somebody's writing songs,

somebody's in a rock band, somebody's a playwright or whatever,

writing poems, and you think, "Wow."

'So it's great to be out of the BBC Scotland studio

'to meet Professor Shona Reid, director of the School of Art.

'The new design school, then,

'presumably there were different avenues you could go down,

'maybe along the competition line.

'Slightly. I mean, we didn't actually ask...

'Many competitions will ask the entrants

'to actually design the building.

'We didn't ask the entrants to design the building.

'We didn't want a final design,

'because as an art and design and architecture environment.

'We wanted to be able to work very closely with the architects

'in refining the thinking around the building,

'the way it would function, the way it would look.

'The brief was almost poetic as well as being functional.

'And I think that then helped Steven Holl to be...

'er, concerned about the way spaces could inspire people.'

His narrative when he spoke about

the way in which his thinking developed about the building

and the inspiration that he had got from Mackintosh

was incredibly compelling.

And, you know, both,

both Mackintosh and Steven Holl are kind of architects of light.

MAN GIVES LECTURE

So Stephen Holl says in his book Questions of Perception,

he says, "Architecture gives the immediacy of sensory experience

"that no other art gives."

Right, so what does he mean by that?

"It gives the immediacy of sensory experience that no other art gives."

So he talks about his awakening to architecture.

He talks about going into the Pantheon in Rome,

and he says, "I walked in the Pantheon,"

and he says, "You suddenly see the Oculus,"

this big hole in the ceiling, and you see the sun shining in,

so you hear all the echoes in the ceiling,

you see the sunlight come in, you feel the marble under your feet.

All right? So there's all these different sensory experiences

going on at the same time. Simultaneously.

And this is how you experience a building,

through all the sensory experiences.

Unlike, say, for example, a painting or a piece of music,

with architecture, when you walk into a building,

you touch it with your feet, you touch it with your hands,

you push the door open and so forth. You see it, you smell it, OK?

So you have all the sensory experiences.

So he says there's something more in architecture

than you get in other arts.

And so that's why he was so awakened to architecture

when he walked into the Pantheon.

I always love how when you come in,

you're drawn to the light already.

The natural light is already part of the experience,

because there's a certain condition of the light dropping

in this large stairwell that just brings you up.

ECHOING: Brings you up, brings you up.

And that was the beginning point for us,

was to analyse all the natural light in the Mackintosh Building

and then convert that into another geometry.

ECHOING: Geometry, geometry, geometry...

When we were analysing this building,

one of the things that we discovered, or felt,

was the power of these vertical...voids of light,

and we transformed that into the driven voids of light.

So this is the basically...

Basically, this is the moment of, let's say...

imagination that gets transformed

into the driven voids which began the process of our concept.

And we transformed that into the structure,

the bringing-in of the light, the inhaling and exhaling of the air,

and marking time. So they're doing four things.

Let me go back to the beginning of my relation to Mackintosh,

which starts in... Seattle, Washington,

the University of Washington,

and thank God I had a couple of great professors,

one of which was Hermann Pundt.

In 1967 or '68 he gave a lecture on the Glasgow School of Art

and Mackintosh, and so, from that time on,

from 1968 on, that building was always in my mind

as something enormously important,

probably...maybe one of the most important buildings in the whole UK.

I started working on these tablets, 5x7, in 1979.

So...you can see all the way back to 1979, so all the way...

I can find the first watercolour

of every single project we ever worked on.

So if you ask me what project, I can find the first watercolours.

This is like another part of the brain, right?

AUDIO FROM "The Organized Mind" by Jim Henson

'You know, I've, um...

'I've learned to walk around inside my own head.

'Now, that might sound silly to you,

'but it's been very, very helpful to me.

'Let me show you how it's done,

'in case you want to try it.'

HOLL: It's chicken or the egg, which comes first.

It's not decipherable. It's simultaneous.

And I make these drawings every morning

on every project that I'm working on.

Actually, this is my notebook

from 2009, arriving in Glasgow on June 16th.

You see the basic plan of volumes,

15-metre cubics,

stacked up in a way that gets north light,

and then you see...the path that's going to connect everything.

That's very important.

How the students move through the spaces,

they call it "creative abrasion".

And then right there you see "driven voids of light".

This is a key. These are the structure.

There will be no other columns.

There will be these big sort of concrete cylindrical voids

that the path actually cuts through. And then....

..making a model of that. You can see where the path is cutting through,

where this cylinder is coming down,

the green glass of the outside,

the stack of volumes, almost 15x15 cubics.

It's all there.

The building is a tool. A tool for...

creative work in the arts.

That's natural, you know?

That's the nature.

I mean, we've done a number of art schools, so we call it, like...

the building as a kind of instrument.

It's not some kind of set-piece, it's an instrument to be utilised.

Students need great space and great proportions and great light.

And they need the building to be tough so they can abuse it.

Because some art students need to throw their paint on the wall.

You know? And need to jackhammer the floor,

and they need to... That's what they need to do, you know?

They need to do a karate chop to the whatever, you know?

And that's what the building is.

LORRY BEEPS

Remarkably, although it's going to sound like a very large figure,

for what we're getting it's actually quite modest.

You know, we're building something of incredibly original design,

very innovative approaches for not that much per square metre.

So it's £49 million - now, that's not just that building

it's the whole budget, and that whole budget includes

all the kind of resources you have to set up,

it also includes all the cost of having to recreate an art school,

a design school in Sky Park

to decant what are, you know, hundreds of students and staff.

LOW CONVERSATION

What happens to people at art school?

I think this is really interesting because I think what happens

to people at art school is they get motivated.

They find things that make them get out of bed in the morning,

and want to change the world. It gives people a mission in life.

Quite often they hold on to that mission for their entire life,

I think that's the really interesting thing for me.

STUDENTS CHAT

Also people, I think, learn how to collaborate

and learn how to learn from each other.

And that's maybe the most important difference between...

The studio system I think is perfect for that,

cos that's what it supports, is people learning from each other,

working together as a team, collaborating.

I think the fact that the designers of the building

have made the effort, you know, have really made the effort

to do something difficult and challenging,

is actually really important to you as a student.

You could just build a shed, you know, you could just a build

-a, you know, a simple big...

-Physical objects take on energy.

If you've spent a lot of time trying really hard

to make something really good, it's usually evident

in the quality of what you produce

and I think it's the quality that someone has,

the time and effort and energy

that someone's invested in creating an environment, that gives students

the confidence to believe they have status, that they're worth it.

HOLL: In a way, it's more exciting...

The more difficult and more challenging the project,

maybe the more exciting it is.

Who wants to do something simple, you know?

It's like mountain climbing.

You want to do, you know, Mount Everest.

Well, in the studio, we challenge ourselves

to make an architecture that is a completely unique experience,

that transcends the day-to-day.

And that comes from Steven at the start,

but also throughout the whole studio.

So there's always a kind of experimental spirit in the studio,

of "What kind of new experience can we make

"that will inspire people?"

We sought early on to connect

with the Mackintosh building,

make a deep relationship.

Not through copying the materials or the details,

but a deep relationship through a language of light.

A new language of light

that connects to the language of light in his building.

The other way, of course, we were connecting with Mackintosh,

and thinking about making space for 21st-century practice of art,

is through great studio volumes.

And you see here the variations of studio volumes,

through the section of the building,

and you see it especially in this section,

where this is the refectory space,

which is a double-height space,

and then here you see

these stepping volumes.

When you make a variation in types of space, in light of space,

that stimulates your senses. That heightens your awareness

so that whenever you turn a corner, there's a different experience -

a different kind of light and, as you move up through the building,

there's a kind of landscape of heights and changes and shifts

that is almost like a new horizon at every floor level, going up.

So while we're working on the studios inside,

we're also testing the materiality outside,

and what the quality and the massing should be.

And we wanted a very silent facade,

and there's three different kinds of glass conditions - clear glass,

translucent glass, clear glass behind our matte facade glass,

and then, of course, the matte glass over the walls.

And we tried many different types of glass

and arrived at this very special glass that hasn't been made before,

that we developed, where the exterior is etched,

it's an acid etch, so it's soft, does not reflect the light.

And that gives a very slight sheen to the atmosphere.

And then it's all held with these bolts that are embedded,

these ghost fittings, so that during the day,

you don't see any of the fixings, you just see the surface,

you see a slight reflection of the sky, and that kind of soft quality.

ENGINE DROWNS SPEECH

The key choice of the glass being non-reflective,

in the main, was really a very important design characteristic.

The north face of the Mackintosh,

the fabulous studios of the north face, um...

owe all their success to the fact of the evenness and the scale of light

that you get into those spaces, into that volume.

On the north, that light is always flat and even,

and non-sunlight-directional.

So it's for that reason that painters historically

like the evenness of the north light,

because it allows them to understand

the tone of the colours that they're painting with,

or drawing with, accurately all the time.

In other words, it's not affected by different light conditions.

To have something across the road that would reflect any glare

or create any glare into those studios

would have been an absolute disaster.

Technically, our role is that

we're a support architect to Steven Holl Architects.

But the fact of the matter is it's been a collaboration from day one.

Steven's clearly the design architect, but he's involved us

in all his decision-making, every stage of the process.

So we're effectively an extension of his studio.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Perfect.

It's exactly what I was expecting.

The proportion, just the slight bit higher at the cornice line.

Plenty of light on that.

Plenty of soft light.

When you live with a building for four years in your brain,

it's exactly what I thought it was.

I mean, it's not like I'm going to be surprised.

This needs to have the glass on it.

That's when you're really going to see this,

when they get this layer of glass on this facade.

Because you can't read this right now

because of the clips and all the rigging.

It's like the chicken just born with the feathers still wet.

You know, it's not quite... You need that skin!

It's still...yeah. It's a little bit of a gangly teenager still.

Congratulations!

-You're pulling it off!

-Thank you. Good to see you.

It's a lot of work, right?

Very nice.

HE LAUGHS

This is great. These are the bones, right?

This whole condition is the kind of... That's the structure.

that's the main... See, in a normal piece of architecture,

you have columns. But you don't have columns in this building.

You have driven voids. They're holding up the building.

So that's like... I don't think this has ever been done before,

where you have voids holding up the whole structure.

Imagine you're just coming to a lecture in this building,

and you only go... You don't go all through the whole building,

you're just coming to a lecture, but you're already getting the excitement

of the entire structure in this single move,

down into the auditorium.

You know what comes to my mind when I look up in those spaces

and see these curving staircases and so on -

the printmaking of Piranesi, an 18th-century printmaker.

And in particular - this may seem absurd to make an analogy here,

but with his imaginary prisons. Those extraordinary interior spaces

that... There's one with a massive great cylindrical volume

that crashes down from the floor above

and then splays out at the bottom, with little apertures in it,

just like the driven voids.

You've got spiral staircases that wind themselves around,

you've got suspended walkways that disappear into nowhere,

and you think, "My God, what's going on here?"

Piranesi's medium, what he's actually working with,

um, is not bricks and mortar and so on, all these are imaginary.

-But his real medium is darkness.

-Yes.

-He excavates space out of shadow.

-Yeah.

That's kind of right, that's appropriate,

in the context of a prison. Because a prison is a place

of enforced confinement, where you suppress human aspiration.

What I think we get with the Steven Holl building

is almost like the positive that's been taken from that negative.

All those qualities there are now flooded with light,

and they're kind of...

It's almost as if they're radiating light from the inside,

which is absolutely appropriate for an educational building,

which is all about enlightenment,

and in particular visual education.

So it becomes... The actual design, if I'm right

in seeing it this way, becomes a metaphor

for the entire educational process.

-Because Piranesi loses us in the dark...

-Yeah!

-..and Holl leads us into light.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Absolutely.

It was worth all those little mock-ups before you did...

-It's incredible.

-Great building.

It's going to be in the history books, this building.

That's for sure.

I've no idea what these are.

Library.

Archive.

Er, irreverence, actually, I think is one of the things I've learned.

SHE LAUGHS

I use this...

Lorna, my PA, texted me when I was on holiday

to say, "I'm sitting in your office whilst a man dressed as a mouse

"is sitting at your table,

"shouting that all the other mice in GSA need to vote for him

"because he's going to be the next big cheese."

Actually, it's a serious artwork,

but there's a wonderful kind of irreverence

about some of what goes on at the art school

which I absolutely love,

and that...

I love that, the freedom to think the impossible.

Which just allows you to be very, very open,

very wide about the possibilities you can pursue,

the thoughts that you can think, the avenues that you can explore.

And, yeah, so I think I've learned that kind of sense of...

open, being open. I'm not sure I can...

emulate it, but I certainly appreciate it.

MUSIC: "The Blue Danube" by Strauss

BUILDER SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

MUSIC CONTINUES

You know, what I really like about Europe

is, you know...

Like, in America, a fat cat gets to name the building

just because he has a lot of money.

This is kind of disgusting. It doesn't have anything to do with

the spirit and the passion that went into building a building,

it's just... You know, it's just somebody with a lot of money

and then they get to name the building.

So I like Europe because usually a building or something like that

is named because of something deeper.

She fought for it, she was the director,

she believes in the total mission, the core mission,

and I think this is great, that the building is named for Shona.

I'm thrilled. I'm very grateful to the people who thought of it.

Grateful to the people who have thought

that it was an appropriate gesture

and recognition of my 14 years here.

And slightly...

Slightly embarrassed, strangely, by it!

But...you know. Such is life.

These complexities and contradictions

are part of what we live with.

HOLL: You know, there's growth in the arts today that is enormous.

All round the globe. Why is it?

Maybe people are starting to realise that art is important.

It isn't just some, you know, side activity,

it's spiritual activity at the core meaning of human existence.

So a school of art is an important thing, you know?

It's an important place for education

and it's an important contribution to a city like Glasgow

which has got a great history of this.

On a way this is one of the most important kind of commissions

a person like myself, who believes in the importance of art, can do.

Because we're making architecture in the service of something

which we believe is at the core importance of existence.

And that's a great honour.

And I think Mackintosh felt the same way.

You finish art school, you think it's the end of something

but, of course, it's absolutely just the beginning of something else.

The beginning of being an artist,

the beginning of getting up every day and deciding you want to do it,

and this is your life and this is what you're here to do.

When no-one's asking you to do it, no-one's paying you to do it,

no-one really wants you to do it,

but you just have to get up every day and say, "I'm an artist."

-You know.

-And although we kind of both talked about

a sort of "Eureka!" moment for a couple of pieces of work,

-it's actually incredibly rare that that happens.

-Yeah.

It's more about working through and working through

and working through things. And that accumulation of experience

and disasters and mistakes, that still happen, of course, you know.

But you...

You kind of get there eventually, you know?

-I think that...

-It's just a process of working and looking and thinking.

But the thing that art schools do is that they channel creativity

and they help people understand how to organise it.

How to structure their creativity.

I think it's important that there are more art schools,

because it's already been proven through research, time and again,

that design in particular has got a predisposition

to produce entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

Helps you take risk, work in collaboration,

it's got all the ingredients you need to produce embryonic businesses.

Everything that we do in this building

is in some relation to the original building.

Every move we make.

In a way, a complementary contrast to the original building.

We took that through even in the details.

For example, you can see throughout the Mackintosh building

slight coloured glass. We took that coloured glass palette

and we said, "His is sprinkled all over the building in a wonderful way.

"In respect of that, we're not going to do that,

"our building's going to be black and white,

"but at the entranceway we will have a flourish of colour."

But it wouldn't be his colours. They would be complementary colours.

So we would take the opposites, you know,

and in a way always be in dialogue with Mackintosh.

The whole building is an homage.

It's to provide great studio spaces for the students,

for sure, but it's an homage to Mackintosh.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys

It already has, I think. I can see by the fact that

they moved in and they kind of flooded Instagram with pictures.

They're already taking pictures cos there's some very inspiring spaces.

And then they made this colour wheel

at the bottom of one of the driven voids.

They're just doing things already!

They've only been in there a couple of weeks

and they're already inspired by the building,

and I think, yeah, it's going to go on for 100 years.

That building's going to be there for a long time.

And I'm very happy about the solidity of it

and the flexibility of it,

and I think that's what an art school's about.