Muriel Gray was sitting at home writing when she first received the news.

She had recently become chair of Glasgow School of Art, and it came in the form of a text from the director, Professor Tom Inns. It said, simply: "Muriel, nothing to worry about, but there's a small fire in the back."

It was May 23. Gray - a journalist, broadcaster and GSA graduate - sped over to the school, getting there in 12 minutes, to find one of Scotland's most iconic buildings ablaze. Soon there were 60-feet flames shooting up from the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building.

Reporters interviewed her crying outside. "I'm not really a sentimental person," she says now. "But I was shocked and horrified. There were also tears of relief when I heard that everybody was safe because there was a moment when we actually didn't know whether everybody had been evacuated from the building."

For GSA, the latter part of 2014 has been a journey of rising out of those ashes. The fire was put out. There was relief that no-one was hurt. But the flames took with them the irreplaceable and historic interiors and fittings of the Mackintosh library, countless rare books from the archive, and, of course, the work of many students who had that day been finishing off projects for their final-year degree show.

Gray went into the building the next morning while the charred interiors were still smouldering. She, the director and archives curator Peter Trowles were the first from the art school inside, and the experience was, she recalls, "devastating". When she went downstairs and found that the Mackintosh lecture theatre was still intact, the emotion overwhelmed her.

"That made me burst into tears," she says. "I didn't expect it. That's where we rehearsed as the choir, where I sat through a million slide tests as a student."

She had been holding it together as she walked through the now "virtually gone" library, but seeing the lecture theatre's near-miraculous survival had her in pieces.

"The firefighters were so gorgeous. One fireman laughed and said, 'In the future we don't need a hose. We just need to point you at a building'."

The library is a loss to the nation. Gray had been there as a student, back in the days when it was a "proper working reference library, where we used to sit up in the balcony and throw pieces of paper at people".

For Gray, there is "no compensation for having lost that absolutely beautiful library". But there is "an opportunity to try to recreate it, to make sure that when the art school is reconstructed, it'll be a fully working art school again, not a museum space".

Though reconstruction plans are not yet set, she says that "whatever happens, whatever decision the design team and committee make, it'll be a working library again and I think that's pretty exciting".

The emotional outpouring that followed the fire, and the depth of feeling that many clearly had for the school, were striking.

"If you've been to GSA as a student or a staff member, or worked in it at all, you just make this bond with it," says Gray. "When you push open those double doors that say 'art school' on them, something happens to you that you never really forget. So when we thought we were losing that, that's what got us all really upset. But then to find that we hadn't lost it and much of it was still there - the joy of that is just brilliant."

In fact, Historic Scotland has estimated that 90% of the building survived intact.

What moved Gray most, though, was the pulling together of staff and students: the students who helped others who had lost their work. As a "newbie" who had only recently started her stint as chair, she quickly found herself in a situation where "I think I not only know every single staff and student member, but I've probably hugged all of them".

It has taken many months for forensic archaeologists to decide what they can salvage from among the ashes. First the building had to dry out and a temporary roof was erected to make it wind and water-tight. But last month the work began. "We've got professional archaeologists in there who are approaching it like a dig, doing it bit by bit and cataloguing everything that comes out and laying it aside," says Gray. "We'll know in the fullness of time what has survived."

When the fire report came out it revealed that what Gray calls a "random, awful perfect storm of events" had set the blaze in motion. The report, by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, stated that a projector had ignited the flammable gases from a foam canister used in a student project.

The fire spread quickly. "We are talking about a very old building that was designed long before any of today's fire precautions were talked about," says Gray.

But the year at Glasgow School of Art wasn't all loss and grief. In fact, says Gray, it feels as if the school has ended 2014 on a high note, with yet another Turner Prize winner in Duncan Campbell and more theorising about what it is the school does that is so special.

In November, the 100 graduate students who lost their work in the fire began the £750,000 Scottish Government-funded Phoenix bursary scheme, which will enable many of them to work not just here, but in 15 cities around the world. "A lot of them are quite excited," says Gray, "because they're working all over the world, and they've been exposed to some things that they might not have otherwise been."

For Gray it has been an unforgettable and emotional year. She now even carries a little bit of the school around, forever part of her, in the form of a Mackintosh tattoo. The stained glass design from a "gone forever" bookcase door from the library has been inked on to her by a GSA student who is also a tattoo artist. "He copied it perfectly and tattooed it," she says. "It's one of my favourite things. I did it as a kind of memory of this year. It gives me joy every time I look at."