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Charles Rennie Mackintosh (June 7, 1868 – December 10, 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, and watercolourist who was a designer in the Arts and Crafts movement and also the main exponent of Art Nouveau in Scotland. |
Life
Born in Glasgow, he attended the former Allan Glen's School. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to an architect named John Hutchison, where he worked from 1884 until 1889. Also during that time he became a draughtsman with Honeyman and Keppie, a new architectural practice, eventually becoming a partner in 1901.
He lived most of his life in the prospering city of Glasgow. Located by the margins of River Clyde, during the Industrial Revolution the city had one of the greatest production centers of heavy engineering and shipbuilding in the world. As the city grew a faster response to the high demand for consumer's needs, goods and arts was necessary. Industrialized, mass-produced items started to gain popularity. |
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Along with the Industrial Revolution, Asian style and emerging modernist ideas also influenced Mackintosh's design concept. When Japanese isolationist regime softened, shipyards built at the River Clyde were exported to Japanese navy and training engineers; Glasgow’s link with the eastern country became particularly close. Japanese design became more accessible and gained tremendous popularity.
This style was admired by Mackintosh because of how it valued restraint and economy of means rather than ostentatious accumulation, simple forms and natural materials rather than elaboration and artifice, the use of texture and light and shadow rather than pattern and ornament. In the old western style furniture was seen as ornament that displayed the wealth of its owner and the value of the piece was established according to the length of time spent creating it. While in the Japanese arts furniture and design was concerned with the quality of the space which was meant to evoke a calming and organic feeling to the interior.
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At the same time a new philosophy concerned with creating functional and practical design was emerging throughout Europe: the so called "modernist ideas." The main concept of the Modernist movement was to develop innovative ideas and new technology: design concerned with present and future, rather than history and tradition. Even though Mackintosh became known as the ‘pioneer’ of the movement, his designs are far removed from the bleak and utilitarianism of modernism… His concern was to build around the needs of people, people seen not as masses but as individuals who needed not a machine for living in but a work of art.
All along he attended evening classes in art at the Glasgow School of Art. It was at these classes that he first met Margaret MacDonald (whom he later married), her sister Frances MacDonald, and Herbert MacNair who was also a fellow apprentice with Mackintosh at Honeyman and Keppie. The group of artists, known as "The Four," exhibited in Glasgow, London and Vienna, and these exhibitions helped establish Mackintosh's reputation. The so-called "Glasgow" style was exhibited in Europe and influenced the Viennese Art Nouveau movement known as Sezessionstil (in English, The Secession) around 1900. |
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He joined a firm of architects in 1889 and developed his own style: a contrast between strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves, e.g. the Mackintosh Rose motif, along with some references to traditional Scottish architecture. The project that helped make his international reputation was the Glasgow School of Art (1897-1909).
Mackintosh’s career was a relatively short one, but of significant quality and impact. All his major commissions were in between 1896 and 1906, where he designed private homes, commercial buildings, interior renovations, church, and furniture. He died in 1928 of throat cancer. |
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| Architectural work:
* Windyhill, Kilmacolm
* Hill House, Helensburgh (National Trust for Scotland)
* House for an Art Lover, Glasgow
* The Mackintosh House
* Queen's Cross Church, Glasgow
* Ruchill Church Hall, Glasgow
* Holy Trinity Church, Bridge of Allan, Stirling
* Scotland Street School, Glasgow, now Scotland Street School Museum.
* The Willow Tearooms, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow; one of Miss Cranston's Tearooms: see Catherine Cranston for his interior design work on her other tea rooms
* Hous'hill, interior design of the home of Catherine Cranston and her husband John Cochrane
* Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
* Craigie Hall, Glasgow
* Martyrs' Public School, Glasgow
* The Royal Highland Fusiliers Regimental Museum, Glasgow
* Former Daily Record offices, Glasgow
* Former Glasgow Herald offices in Mitchell Street, now The Lighthouse - Scotland's Centre for Architecture,
* 78 Derngate, Northampton (interior design for Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke, founder of Bassett-Lowke)
* 5 The Drive, Northampton (for Bassett-Lowke's brother-in-law) |
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Design work and paintings
Mackintosh also worked in interior design, furniture, textiles and, metalwork. Much of this work combines Mackintosh's own designs with those of his wife, whose flowing, floral style complimented his more formal, rectilinear work. Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, Mackintosh's architectural designs often included extensive specifications for the detailing, decoration, and furnishing of his buildings. His work was shown at the Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900.
Later in life, disillusioned with architecture, Mackintosh worked largely as a watercolourist, painting numerous landscapes and flower studies (often in collaboration with Margaret, with whose style Mackintosh's own gradually converged) in the Suffolk village of Walberswick (to which the pair moved in 1914), and where he was arrested as a possible spy in 1915.
By 1923, he had entirely abandoned architecture and design and moved to the south of France with Margaret where he concentrated on watercolour painting. He was interested in the relationships between man-made and naturally occurring landscapes. Many of his paintings depict Port Vendres, a small port near the Spanish border, and the nearby landscapes.
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Retrospect
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Mackintosh's designs gained in popularity in the decades following his death. His House for an Art Lover was finally built in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park in 1996, and the University of Glasgow (which owns the majority of his watercolour work) rebuilt a terraced house Mackintosh had designed, and furnished it with his and Margaret's work (it is part of the University's Hunterian Museum). The Glasgow School of Art building (now renamed "The Mackintosh Building") is regularly cited by architectural critics as among the very finest buildings in the UK. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society tries to encourage a greater awareness of the work of Mackintosh as an important architect, artist and designer. |
Sources:
* Alan Crawford-Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Thames & Hudson)
* John McKean-Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Architect, Artist, Icon (Lomond)
* David Brett-Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship (1992)
* Timothy Neat-Part Seen Part Imagined (1994)
* John McKean-Charles Rennie Mackintosh Pocket Guide |
Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society Glasgow, Scotland
Links to Rennie SItes |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh
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