Architecture, History and Theory 1 - Scotland Street School

My task is to examine Scotland Street School by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I shall examine the architecture by first describing the building and then by making a comparison to a similar building to determine which features of Mackintosh’s design were original and which were typical of that building type or era.

Scotland Street School was completed in 1906 and was opened on 15th August of that year. The School is located in the south side of Glasgow and upon it’s opening it served to educate the children of the Kingston and Tradeston areas of the city. The population of these areas would have grown around this time due to the flourishing shipbuilding industry by the Clyde. The School was commissioned by the School board of Glasgow and Mackintosh was given a fairly strict brief in terms of what had to be included in the design: separate playgrounds, outside toilets, entrances and staircases for girls, boys and infants; teachers’ rooms on each floor; a drill hall and electric lighting. He had to allow accommodation for 1250 pupils and include a cookery room in his design ~ information gathered from leaflet available at Scotland Street School Museum ~. During the design of the school Mackintosh had a tight budget for several reasons. Firstly, the School Board exercised stringent cost controls ~ Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Architect and artist ~ on all of it’s buildings. The second reason is that the board had to pay a lot of money for the site of the school because it was situated in a highly sought after industrial area. The site cost £13,500 in 1904, compared to £2,100 and £4,358 for the site of other schools around this time. ~ Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Co. ~. These constraints fundamentally influenced the design of the school and many have asked how Mackintosh’s architecture would have developed without this influence. The final cost of the school was £34,219 which put it £1,519 over the loan that had been given by the Scottish Education Department. When it opened in 1906 the school had 205 boys and 172 girls, the school remained open for more than 70 years until it finally closed it’s doors in 1979 with only 89 pupils still attending the school. In 1990 it became Scotland Street School Museum and until this day continues to educate people on the history of education in Scotland.

The exterior of Scotland Street School is very interesting. As you approach it, the wall at the front makes it clear that this building is rather unique. The large arched entrances and curved fencing are more interesting and artistic than most schools and the way in which the janitor’s house forms part of this wall serves to make it less of a boundary because it gives the impression that you are not entering the school but simply transitioning into the grounds. It maintains the character and presence of a typical Victorian school but at the same time has some rather striking and original features. The main façade consists of a central block with a tower at each end, this is then flanked by two recessed wings. The towers are highly glazed as is the main block which has larger windows than one would expect. The design is completely symmetrical, not including the janitor’s house. At the base of the left tower is the girls entrance and at the base of the right tower is the boys entrance. The infant entrance is located in the centre of the and directly enters the drill hall. At each side of the building there is an arch which leads around the building to the 2 separate playgrounds at the back. The rear elevation of the building is flat and functional with nothing but a few small window details to break it up. The windows at the rear are very large to maximise the sunlight which is used both to light the classrooms and also to limit the amount of heating that would be necessary for the building. The most interesting aspect of the rear elevation is the use of the ’tree of life’ motif and the thistle, used regularly by Mackintosh. This is highlighted in Wendy Kaplan’s book on Mackintosh in which David Brett shows that these motifs are used in a much more complex but equally abstract formation of cubes and triangles. However, even this ornamentation is subtle and does not detract from the overall simplicity of the design.

Robert Macleod says that with Scotland Street School Mackintosh had created a building with the ’spirit of the new’. By this, he means that in the simplicity of his design and limited use of ornamentation he has created a new style separate from that of the past. I think that this phrase sums up exactly what Mackintosh has achieved with this building.

The internal layout of the building is rather straight forward. The rear of the building contains all of the classrooms. This means that all classrooms are south facing maximising heat and sunlight for the pupils. The front of the building is used for vertical circulation and utilities such as toilets, cloakrooms etc. This is a very good way of organising the school as it simplifies the circulation. The classrooms are located along one corridor which divides them from the circulation of the building, this would reduce noise and disturbance in the classrooms. The school has three storeys. The ground floor was used for infants and the top floor used for seniors with the first floor accommodating the middle years.

What struck me most about the interior of Scotland Street School was the visibility throughout the building. From the mezzanine level you can see almost all of the ground floor. I recognised how useful this would be in a school for supervision of the pupils. I noticed that the upper floors had slightly less visibility, this makes sense as these were used by older students who would require less supervision. Mackintosh achieves this visibility by opening up the stairwells to the corridor and drill hall. Another interesting thing which I noticed is that from the stairwell you can see most of the front playgrounds through the vast glazing on the towers. This is partly due to the fact that the floor on the stairwells does not reach the outside of the towers allowing views downwards. Mackintosh struggled to keep this feature, something which the school board did not wish to keep but it is one of the best features of the completed the building and it is very difficult to imagine what kind of atmosphere the school would have if the floor reached the towers.

While Scotland Street School is an interesting and unique building it also borrows a lot from the past in order to function so well as a school. The layout of the School with Classrooms at the back and facilities at the front is not an original concept however due to it’s effectiveness in this school mackintosh effectively showed it to be the best way to organise a school. In the years after the completion of Scotland Street School many architects utilised this layout in their designs for schools. David Walker points this out in his book showing that the schools built by J. H. Langlands and William Lamond at Dens Road and at Whinnybrae in Dundee use exactly the same arrangement, as do John Alexander Carfrae’s schools in Edinburgh. One unique feature of Mackintosh’s design was the amount of glass used. Mackintosh understood the need for light in a school and that sunlight provided the best solution to this. In his use of light he created an atmosphere unlike many schools of the time, instead of being oppressive and cramped his design gave a sense of space and openness whish was rare in Victorian Glasgow. I think that David Walker explained it best when he said the elements that made Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School remarkable were the stepping back of the mezzanines and the mullioned semi cylindrical stair towers. However, I would have to add that Mackintosh’s commitment to producing a perfectly functional building without un-necessary ornamentation is what makes this building so unique. In a way the building works so well because uses pieces from other designs and pulls them all together along with a few new elements to create a building perfectly fitted for it’s use.

In conclusion Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School is a fairly simple concept. It is a school built on a reasonably tight budget with a fairly closed brief. The brilliance of it is that Mackintosh was able to take both of these constraints to their limit in order to create a building whose perfect fitness for purpose and, for its time, ruthless simplicity gives it the spirit of the new.


References:

Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
W. Kaplan, Abbeville Press, London, 1996,
p.115-148

Charles Rennie Mackintosh : Architect and artist,
R. Macleod, Collins, Glasgow, 1983,
p.113-117

Charles Rennie Mackintosh - Synthesis in form,
J. Steele, Academy Editions, London, 1994,
p.139-148

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Co.,
D. Stark, Stenlake Publishing, Glasgow, 2004,
p.101-107