Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) is today recognised internationally as an architect of world-wide importance. He occupied a pivotal point between the Victorian age and the Modern Movement, at an important period in the emergence of Glasgow as one of Britain's most important Victorian cities. His work has been an inspiration for subsequent generations including Aldo van Eyck, Hans Hollein, Arata Isosaki and Enric Miralles. Yet, remarkably, despite the extensive literature devoted to his career over the past 50 years, his core activity as an architect is conspicuously under-researched.

'Mackintosh Architecture' will provide for the first time a comprehensive, in-depth evaluation of his achievements as an architect based on an innovative and authoritative combination of archival research and building survey and analysis. The three-year nine-month project will be undertaken by the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery in partnership with Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. The project will deliver a thorough analysis of the context, importance and contribution of Mackintosh's architecture.

It will generate the first detailed catalogues raisonnés of Mackintosh's architectural projects and his architectural designs, together with transcriptions from the practice job-books and other archival sources. It will systematically identify and research the wider networks of clients, contractors and tradesmen and define their contributions. Physical surveys by Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission will identify construction methods, materials, and technology used, and confirm the history of subsequent change.

The research data will be made available via a well-promoted, richly-illustrated, free-access, online database with the results analysed in a series of specialist, on-line essays and an exhibition and conference organised by the Hunterian at the conclusion of the project. The format of the outputs will ensure knowledge transfer to the broadest audience and serve as an invaluable aid to art historians, curators, conservators and heritage workers, the wider education sector and the general public.

The research will deliver other benefits. It will provide a valuable foundation for further evaluation of Mackintosh in the context of his British and international peer group, and support future studies in architectural and social history, including Glasgow's wider architectural history, the emergence of major Victorian cities in Britain, and the history of Victorian building trades. It will also support the recording and appropriate management of documented and currently unpublished built work.

The research process will provide a methodology for future evaluations of the oeuvre of individual architects. The website will provide a model for the presentation of an individual architect's output. The majority of currently-available on-line architecture-related resources provide either collection listings, picture sites, or brief illustrated essays. No authoritative single-figure sites exist delivering comparable comprehensive, in-depth, well-illustrated building data, designs, photographs, archival material and analysis.