At around midnight I was aimlessly checking Twitter when Martin, a friend whose bookshop is near the Glasgow School of Art, tweeted an image indicating “the Mack” was on fire.

Again? So soon? Impossible. Maybe a trick of the light on a bright spring night.



But the fire was real. Another disastrous inferno. The cause is as yet unknown, but the sadness is palpable throughout the city. Mercifully there were no fatalities or injuries.



I graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a Masters in 2010. I loved the Mackintosh building, known widely as the Mack, and the school is still central to Glasgow’s thriving, competitive art scene. It’s also true that the city is a great place to be an artist with studios, affordable housing and a can-do mentality of exhibitions in your friend’s lounge.

I fondly remember the beautiful and imposing lecture theatre, with its uncomfortable seating but overwhelming sense of history, and the inspiring experience of working in such a stunning building and drawing on its collection of plaster casts.



The Glasgow School of Art is also a social centre, with exhibitions and gigs. Bands play in it, and some of their members - from Bob Hardy of Franz Ferdinand and Travis to the late Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit - have studied there.

Graduates may not end up sticking with art, but they often stay in Glasgow to run cafes, open design practices, work as community arts officers or open Women’s Libraries. Nor is it not just visual arts, but architecture and design that will be hit hard by this latest catastrophe. Glasgow loves art, and loves its art school, and tolerates some occasionally bizarre behaviour such as performance artists dressed as chickens on space hoppers.



The joke used to be that the Turner committee might as well announce the winner on the steps of the Mack, as alumni won or were nominated so often - as Charlotte Prodger, a contemporary of mine, was this year. Every GSA student will have spent some time in the Mack, in a studio, the library, or huddled on its atmospheric stairways.

The 2014 fire was an accident caused by fumes from expanding foam creating a conflagration which ran wild. At the time, we thought that fire – which destroyed degree show work – was an unimaginable inferno. Mercifully, this time, final year students had graduated, their work had been stored or displayed elsewhere.

The timing of the latest fire is a horrendous coincidence. On Friday, a new mural celebrating the 150th birthday of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, neglected in his day but much-loved now, was revealed. It is painted on the side of the Clutha, a pub itself destroyed and then rebuilt after a helicopter crash in 2013.



Right now Glasgow is stunned, overwhelmed by sadness, exuding sympathy for the craftspeople, salvage experts, makers and builders who have spent the past four years rebuilding the Mack. I don’t know if that will be possible this time around, but for future students to be denied the possibility of perching, awestruck in the Mack and using its restored library or wandering along the Hen Run, would be a tragedy in itself.



The restoration from the previous fire was due to be completed by the end of the year. As the designer Emlyn Firth posted on Facebook: “Think most of us are still pretty numb from witnessing the Glasgow School of Art fire last night. I’d been really lucky to get a tour of the restoration back in February, and had fallen in love with the great building all over again.”



This time, most of the salvaged fixtures were reportedly stored off-site. The wonderful stone, art-nouveau facade, however, seems to have collapsed. Can it be rebuilt? An entire city, an entire country, holds its breath. The Mack was more than another art school. Perhaps it was a temple.

• Penny Anderson is an artist living in Glasgow

• This article was amended on 18 June 2018 to change the description of the Glasgow School of Art to art nouveau.

