Scotland Street School

The Govan School Board, which built some of the largest board schools in Britain, gave Mackintosh a strict brief: a fixed number of classrooms of a fixed size around a central hall, with segregated entrances and stairs for boys, girls and infants. Mackintosh answered the constraint by making the two stair towers, rather than the classroom block, the building's public face: glazed cylinders capped with witch's-hat slate roofs, echoing the tower houses of Falkland Palace and Rowallan Castle that he had sketched as a student, filled with light from top to bottom for pupils climbing between floors. The classroom block behind is comparatively plain, its tall windows admitting the north light school design of the period favoured for even, glare-free illumination. Costs ran well over the Board's budget of £34,291 and Mackintosh's design was initially resisted before being built largely as drawn. It operated as a school until 1979 and reopened as a museum of Scottish education in 1990.