Designer of ruined building had a fraught relationship with his city of birth

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born in Glasgow in June 1868, was perhaps the key designer to forge the link between contemporary art and architecture that is now taken for granted.

He is closely associated with his birthplace. It was not always that way, though, and the loss of his greatest monument – the library at Glasgow School of Art – in a fire for a second, calamitous time could stand as an uncomfortable emblem of his sometimes fraught relationship with a city that he finally left for London in 1915 because of lack of work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A multimillion-pound restoration project at Glasgow School of Art was under way after a fire in 2014. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A groundbreaking designer of buildings, furniture and textiles who attended the art school himself in the 1880s, “Toshie” had a big influence on the Modern movement during his most productive years, between 1896 and 1916.

His work with three fellow Glasgow artists, his wife, Margaret Macdonald, her sister, Frances, and Frances’s husband, Herbert MacNair, meant they were often seen as one artistic force, led by Mackintosh. They were known as Glasgow’s “Four” or the Spook School.

He joined the Glasgow architectural practice Honeyman and Keppie after art school as a draughtsman, rising to become a partner, and his hand is evident in many of its buildings.

Mackintosh went on to create a number of acclaimed Modernist tea rooms, concentrating on a total look in which he designed the interiors, furniture, lighting and even the waitresses’ outfits.

Windyhill, a house built just outside Glasgow in 1901 and up for sale four years ago, remains a testament to his clean lines, while his 1902 Hill House in Helensburgh survives unaltered and is open to the public.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Hill House in Helensburgh, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Photograph: Alamy

A recreation of Mackintoshes’ own house is also on view at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Art Gallery.

Yet the designer was a neglected figure through the middle of the last century, and the majority of his original work, chiefly made in and around Glasgow, has already been lost.

In the early 1970s, however, his reputation for innovation and artistry began to grow internationally. By 1979 a desk he had designed for himself in 1901 sold at auction for £89,200, a world-record price for a modern piece.

Whatever happens to his library now, Mackintosh’s talent can still be widely enjoyed. Although a design for Liverpool Cathedral was turned down, his distinctive rooms and furniture, or copies of them, are regularly featured on screen, for example in the films Inception and Blade Runner.

Mackintosh died of cancer in London in 1928.

