The Magazine with a few hand-written pages was a distinguished experimentation platform for Mackintosh and his contemporaries, whom he had met at the Glasgow
3. Plant Motifs in Mackintosh’s Architectural Ornament
3.2. Scotland Street Public School of 1903-1907
3.2.1. Formal Analysis
According to the block plan of Scotland Street Public School handed to the Glasgow Dean of Guild Court in 1904 (fig. 69), the south area marks off the symmetrical position of boys’ playground in the west and the girls’ playground in the east.207 The block plan of Scotland Street Public School surrounded by an enclosing wall, the janitor’s house sits in the north-west corner. The north main building of Scotland Street Public School is three stories high according to Scotch Education Department standards, and includes twenty-one classrooms, a cookery classroom, and a hall for morning rally use.208 With the ground-floor plan (fig. 70), the north façade sets up separate entrances for boys, girls and infants flanking two towers, and includes rows of transparent windows rooted in Scottish baronial architecture connected with staircases (fig. 71).209 The conical towers are in reference to the drawing of the Falkland Palace dated 1900 (fig. 72).210 Mackintosh assimilated the characteristics of indigenous castle-like towers and attempted to evolve the forms of towers in versatile variations. In Scotland Street Public School, he demonstrated windowpane towers decorated with abstracted natural patterns.
A unit of two inverted colored-triangles and thirty small squares is repeated five times
206 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland Street Public School Perspective, 1906, pencil and ink, 542 x 1102 mm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41346.
207 Honeyman Keppie and Mackintosh, Scotland Street Public School Block Plan, 1904, pencil, ink and wash, 510 x 428 mm, Glasgow City Archives Collection, inv. SR4/4/48.
208 Wendy Kaplan (as note 9), pp. 140-141.
209 Mackintosh’s office, Scotland Street Public School Ground-floor Plan, 1904, pencil, ink and wash, 448 x 637 mm, Glasgow City Archives Collection, inv. SR4/4/48. Scotland Street Public School, view from north-west, from: Builders’ Journal and Architectural Engineer 24, 28 November 1906, p. 268.
210 Falkland Palace, featured with baronial castellated towers in stone, was constructed as a hunting lodge for Scottish royal members between 1501 and 1541. Falkland Palace at
http://www.nts.org.uk/Visit/Falkland-Palace/ (accessed July 17, 2017). “Towers and Windows,” in:
Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning at
http://www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/freetext/display/?rs=42&xml=des&q=scotland%20street%20school (accessed July 17, 2017). Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Falkland Palace, 1900, pencil on paper, 25.6 x 20 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41423.
68
in each tower (fig. 73). The pattern of a stylized tree resembles the composition of the upper tiled-façade of the Daily Record building, with squares shaped into large triangles (fig. 74). The motif of birds in flight is adopted as decoration on the tower’s exterior wall (fig. 75). The chequered pattern on the infant’s entrance (fig. 76) started to become Mackintosh’s favorite expression in the early 1900s and inclined him to engage in a search for more multiple kinds of representations. His subsequent drawing of Fritillaria gives more indicative details and was given reinforcement in 1915 (fig. 77).211 Mackintosh was fascinated by Fritillaria, a species of common vernacular plant suited to a temperate climate. Fritillarias grow at the end of a curved stem and have drooping hanging buds and trellis flowers. Black and white grids in Mackintosh’s signature cartouche echo the Fritillaria device pattern (fig. 78), which is similar to those on the infant’s entrance (fig. 76) of Scotland Street Public School.212
At the south façade of Scotland Street Public School overlooking the playground, the ornament appears through all three floors from the bottom to the top.
Given this intention to make the plant size equal to the height of the building, plant motifs played out on the architectural surface in Scotland Street Public School are meant to echo the treatment of the enlarged plant in his sketches of St. Cuthbert’s
Church, Holy Island dating from 1901, which also features trials that interplay between
architecture and flowers (figs. 79, 80).213 Mackintosh experimented with the best proportions of plant motifs and buildings by vertically and horizontally overlapping them, proving that to understand plants, in fact, is to understand Mackintosh’s211 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Fritillaria, 1915, pencil and watercolor on paper, 25.3 x 20.2 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41015.
212 Given Mackintosh’s preference for this kind of flower, they are intentionally planted in the garden lawns of Hill House today. According to the guidebook published by the National Trust for Scotland.
Lyn Turner (ed.), The Hill House, Edinburgh 2015, p. 46.
213 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, St. Cuthbert’s Church, Holy Island, 1901, pencil and watercolor on paper, 20.3 x 26 cm, inv. GLAHA 41406; St. Cuthbert’s Church, Holy Island, 1901, pencil and watercolor on paper, 20.3 x 25.8 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41407.
69
architectural ornament inspiration. Among Mackintosh’s botanical sketches, Sea Pink
Holy Island (fig. 81) is the only drawing clearly indicating the bud, seed and flower by
caption.214 Mackintosh applied his observation of the proportions of the plant’s bud and stem to the structure of the building. The carving at the center on the south façade summons up the unique Tree of Life motif (fig. 82). The design of the carvings on the south façade is dominated by geometrical devices. There is no doubt that they are simplified plant motifs. The treatment of plant forms is reduced to rectilinear and rectangular patterns. The ornament at the two end bays had not appeared in the original sketch of 1904 (fig. 90).215 Each end bay of the central form, ornamented with perpendicular lines, triangles and squares (fig. 92), can be seen today as foliated embellishment, as can the previous photograph of the south elevation on record in theBuilders' Journal and Architectural Engineer 24 of 1906 (fig. 93).
216 This suggests that Mackintosh’s design was developing during the building stages. Alison Brown states that the circular tree was rooted in the Tree of 1900 (fig. 94).217Despite the deviation from the client’s intention, Mackintosh, as an architect, insisted upon saying that “I take my stand on what I myself consider my personal ideal.”218
The School Board of Glasgow was dissatisfied with Mackintosh’s design.
However, in response to the uncompromising notion raised in the lecture Untitled Paper
on Architecture that “a building must be considered internally and externally as altering
214 Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Sea Pink Holy Island, 1901, pencil and watercolor on paper, 25.8 x 20.2 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 41004.
215 Honeyman, Keppie, and Mackintosh, School Board of Glasgow, Proposed School Scotland Street:
Elevation to Playgrounds, 1904, pencil, ink and wash, 445 x 636 mm, Glasgow City Archive Collection, inv. SR4/4/48.
216 Scotland Street Public School, details of south elevation, from: Builders' Journal and Architectural Engineer 24, 28 November 1906, p. 269.
217 Alison Brown, “Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Deciphering the Ornament at Scotland Street School,” in: Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society Newsletter 91, Winter 2006, p. 7. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Sketchbook of Tours in East Anglia and Devon pp. 48 – 49: Tree, 1900, pencil on paper, 37.2 x 13.4 cm, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, inv. GLAHA 53013/35.
218 Mackintosh, “Seemliness, 1902,” in: Pamela Roberson (as note 1) p. 223 [G 10].
70
with every step you take,” Mackintosh still variedly extended the exterior use of green to interior tiles and added blue and white tiles for capitals at the mezzanine (fig. 83), corridor (fig. 84) and pier levels surrounding the drill hall (fig. 85). These tiles are reminiscent of those used in the staircases in the second stage of the Glasgow School of Art (fig. 86). Five bays of windows, including another upward three bays of long windows for the library, protrude from the wall later built in the second stage of the Glasgow School of Art of 1907-1909 (fig. 87). The recession and projection feature the west façade design of the Glasgow School of Art, which is different from the standard-size classroom windows on north and south façade of Scotland Street Public School (fig. 88).