The work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in his Maryhill Queen’s Cross Church and preserving the architecture of Glasgow

National World - LocalTV

Charles Rennie Mackintosh has had an incredible influence on the look and feel of Glasgow with his architecture.

Transcript

00:00 This was built as a simple church but you know there's so much detail and

00:08 intricacy and character in some of the simple aspects, the

00:13 little flourishes that establish it as a Macintosh style. Is there something

00:17 there to be learned for modern architecture in terms of like how you

00:20 can do things to establish a style but you know still proceed with your project?

00:26 It seems like it's always an afterthought, these little embellishments and stuff like that.

00:30 Yeah, he incorporated that. I mean some of it's mostly out of drawings as well.

00:34 He wasn't, he wouldn't have been the easiest. He had, I think Macintosh seen

00:37 everything in complete whole. Yeah. And he might have found it frustrating today when you

00:43 look at the processes of that aspect there. But there's something about the

00:46 Macintosh buildings, there's a soul in them all. You know there's something you feel

00:50 good. I've always said that you should put Macintosh in the NHS because it's got a

00:56 feeling of being good whether you're in the School of Art or here. We have people

00:59 that have come in here and they just feel like all the problems have just been washed

01:03 away. You know and that's magical. Yeah. The balance here is you know having a

01:08 building that's got a distinctive look, it's important to the city but it's also

01:15 got a purpose here. Do you think that that's important as well as you know

01:20 like not just preserving buildings but ensure that they still are part of the

01:23 life of the city? Yeah I think the meeting we had with Susan Aitken was talking

01:26 about looking at buildings that they could repurpose for accommodation like

01:30 to bring people back because I think it's at the lowest it's been for since

01:34 the beginning. You think what Glasgow population was like in Macintosh day I

01:37 think it reached sort of about 1.3 million. It's half that now. And a lot of

01:43 people don't live in the city. So I think they're trying to look at how they

01:47 repurpose and the aspects the easiest way they can do it. I was just up in Huntly

01:53 last week and was it 30th Square, a beautiful building it used to be a shop

01:59 and it's been repurposed by the people and again that was them discussing

02:03 people what they wanted with the town. Okay Huntly is a smaller town but I

02:09 think we need to have that and get a buy-in from a dialogue with people what

02:12 they need. And I like the idea in Paris where every area of a city is like a

02:17 little village. You don't have to go out of town. You know if you look at

02:21 this Queens Cross when in Macintosh's day you had shops at the bottom and this

02:27 is all tenements. There's like a canyon and the tenements going down. You had shops

02:31 below the houses. It was all close proximity. That to me makes a lot more

02:36 sense. Yeah. When I lived away from Glasgow I used to enjoy seeing

02:42 television programs and you catch a glimpse of a street and you'd instantly

02:45 know it was Glasgow. As we're at a ferocious building point it's almost

02:52 like we're not realizing how much impact at the building that we're doing and we

02:55 have done for the last five years, will do for the next ten, will have on the

03:01 look of Glasgow. Just that cityscape, that visibility of landmarks and

03:08 stuff like that. How can modern buildings learn from what Glasgow has been

03:13 established, the established look of Glasgow? How do you think that can make

03:18 it be less generic in the future? I think good architecture and thoughts and

03:23 long-term planning for the city. I think you need to have something like a 30 year

03:27 plan. Part of the problem with the political system is you've got a five

03:30 year kind of windows and they're all sort of then changing about and again

03:35 it's money, it's the UK government, it's the Scottish government, it's how you marry it.

03:39 Glasgow's got a fantastic grid system. You've got that aspect there, you've got some

03:43 fantastic buildings and you just need to look after.

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