Glasgow School of Art (Mackintosh Building)

The commission for a new art school on the steep Garnethill site went to Honeyman & Keppie in 1896, the school's director Francis Newbery choosing Mackintosh for the job. He was twenty-eight and still a salaried assistant. Money ran out, so it went up in two campaigns — the east half finished in 1899, the west half with the library in 1907–09 — and the ten-year gap is legible in the fabric, the later wing harder, taller and more abstract than the first. The north elevation solves what was really an engineering brief. Painting studios need vast, even light, so Mackintosh hung three enormous studio windows in the masonry, braced them with iron, and then made the ironwork itself the ornament: brackets, finials and knotted motifs that turn a structural necessity into the building's signature. The entrance bay is deliberately off-centre and deliberately odd. Fire destroyed the library in May 2014 and gutted the whole building in June 2018; the shell stands propped, awaiting a reconstruction promised but not yet begun.