Steven Holl design: The Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art (2014)
Steven Holl's building makes a very bold (or foolhardy?) gesture of difference in a very traditional neighborhood of Glasgow. This is after all the Glasgow School of Art, which for many decades could point proudly to its maintenance and preservation of what was generally recognized as Glasgow's most important building.
Now, in the 2020 the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow School of Art is gone - and any possible reconstruction seems to be at least a decade away. And in its place there is the Steve Holl Glasgow School of Art. Is Holl really doing a good job of integrating his design into the urban fabric?
To be fair, Holl's Reid Building was completed in 2014, before the calamities that befell Rennie Mackintosh's masterpiece about the street. And I have no doubt that the Reid building was intended as a counterweight in dialogue as it were to its neighbor - which sadly now is a shell in ruins, wrapped in forlorn scaffolding.
Steven Holl design: The Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art (2014)
Steven Holl's building makes a very bold (or foolhardy?) gesture of difference in a very traditional neighborhood of Glasgow. This is after all the Glasgow School of Art, which for many decades could point proudly to its maintenance and preservation of what was generally recognized as Glasgow's most important building.
Now, in the 2020 the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow School of Art is gone - and any possible reconstruction seems to be at least a decade away. And in its place there is the Steve Holl Glasgow School of Art. Is Holl really doing a good job of integrating his design into the urban fabric?
To be fair, Holl's Reid Building was completed in 2014, before the calamities that befell Rennie Mackintosh's masterpiece about the street. And I have no doubt that the Reid building was intended as a counterweight in dialogue as it were to its neighbor - which sadly now is a shell in ruins, wrapped in forlorn scaffolding.