Glasgow City of Architecture
Recently I was asked if I had any memories of the Garden festival, but sadly no, it was before we came to this city. However, shortly after our arrival here, Glasgow was European City of Architecture, for which many memorable events were arranged.
There was a special exhibition of newly built houses by the Green, which we looked at together with friends from Suffolk, Dave an architect himself, so professionally interested. We, having recently moved in our new home, found these houses lovely to look at, but somewhat impractical, there was hardly any storage place, not even wardrobes to put your coats in, we thought that the design must have been more important than the life of people in these houses.
This was echoed by a lecturer from the university, a Professor Macaulay, who said as much about Mr Mackintosh’ s house. I attended these lectures which were part of the programme of the festival.
Mr Macaulay told us that Mackintosh had been friends with the most eminent painters of his day but had not a single picture on his home’ s wall, the place was so finely kept that nobody might be tempted to sit on these chairs by the fire place and eat fish and chips.
The former university building,“ Old College”, was located on High Street.
Glasgow is said to be the city with the best Victorian architecture in Britain, if not in Europe, but it has not been very good at preserving its heritage.
According to Mr Macaulay, the finest Renaissance building in the city had been the old University, but Glasgow wanted a new one, so it sold the building to a railway company and had it demolished.
The job to build the new one went to a Londoner, Gilbert Scott, whereas Alexander Thompson was only allowed to transfer the gatehouse of the old university to the new site. That chosen site proved to be at first not suitable for the building and had to be made safe first, which put the price up considerably, not unusual for large public projects, like the Scottish parliament building which was being built at the time of the festival.
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