It was calm and cool and eerie inside the Mackintosh Building yesterday.
And, as Muriel Gray, chair of the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) has noted, it is getting it's own smell back. Nine months after the disastrous fire which spread through the landmark building, the scents of fire and smoke are dissipating.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be invited to don a hard hat and hi-viz vest again, and have a tour through the recuperating building on Glasgow's Renfrew Street. The smell of smoke and dust, strong when I last visited, has largely gone. With its massive temporary roof on, light restored, and heating - in places - a sense of calm, as well as desolate emptiness, resides. There was a test of fire alarms when I was there too, the noise echoing around the empty rooms, studios, and corridors. The building is secure and, they say, damp-free.
And in the Mackintosh Library, which, when I visited last autumn, was a blackened, chaotic room full of ash and detritus, there is now a semblance of order. All the ash and debris, charcoal and scorched books, the collapsed mezzanine, has now been carefully, scientifically and methodically removed by the team of archaeologists from Edinburgh-based Kirkdale Archaeology. Floorboards are exposed. A pile of early 20th Century bricks lies against one wall, with 'Bishopbriggs' clearly marked on them.
The archaeologists painstaking sifted through those chaotic remains to find artefacts that can be salvaged, and mapped the damage to the room. What was found in the room will be revealed in the coming weeks. But it is already known that they include Mackintosh lamps, enamel broaches, and parts of tables and chairs. The library's floor is underpinned and stable. The room, without the suspended studio that hung above it, is blackened but clean and sparse, studded by the six charred pillars, like standing stones, that held up that mezzanine, which is also gone. Its windows are open to the elements, and in places its stone work is clearly revealed.
Upstairs from the Library is the Hen Run and the Loggia. Both still stand, and can, it seems, be restored to some degree. A studio space, with its pillars crenellated and blackened by the fire, also stands empty. Demonstrating the strange way the fire spread through the building, the adjoining Conservatory is almost entirely untouched. On the top floor, entirely enclosed by the vast temporary roof, are the three Professor's studios, also sparse and empty.
No physical work in restoring the building will begin until next Spring, it is thought, after an architects firm has been chosen by the GSA. Companies based in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Hong Kong are on the short list for practices who could design the restoration of the building: Avanti Architects, John McAslan + Partners, LDN Architects LLP, Page\Park Architects and Purcell. Will they renew or remake? Right now, the building is in the first stages of a long recovery.
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