The genius of Charles Rennie Mackintosh is recognised now, but wasn't in his lifetime

In a scene set in Blade Runner hero Rick Deckard’s apartment there are two wooden high-backed chairs. They are both original, both made in the early 20th century, and both were designed by a Scotsman, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Scott wanted timeless furnishings that would speak of ethereal quality, so his production team gave him two Argyle chairs by Mackintosh.

The two chairs are a bit like the film – uniquely stylish, classy and quite distinctive though not out of place. So was the man who designed them.

As probably the most influential Scottish architect of the 20th century, it is a sad fact that many of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s best designs were never actually turned into anything concrete during his life and that he only received true recognition of his genius long after he was dead. Indeed what is generally reckoned to be one of his greatest pieces of architecture, House for an Art Lover in Glasgow, was not actually completed until almost 70 years after he died.

Imagine if he and we had been able to see in stone reality his designs for a railway terminus, a science museum, a concert hall and, above all, Liverpool Cathedral – George Gilbert Scott won the 1903 competition and Mackintosh didn’t make the short list with a design that is now reckoned a masterpiece. It was too futuristic for the assessors, featuring statues that melded into buttresses among other details which led the magazine British Architect to note of the design competition entry at the time: “It has an excellent interior, and is distinctly the most original and clever design of its kind submitted. It has an excellent plan in its general proportions and details … an effect of much dignity and richness is obtained in this remarkably able design.”

Mackintosh was very bitter about being passed over for the cathedral job, but in truth he was too far ahead of the game for English tastes at the time. Nevertheless, he managed to cram into a period of just over 10 years enough solid work to make him recognised across Europe as a fine architect whose style influenced many other practitioners in his profession. He then moved on to art and particularly watercolours and while none of his paintings and drawings can be placed in the very highest echelons of artistic endeavour, Mackintosh still made a cultural impact that is perhaps not truly appreciated in his native country to this day.

He is probably one of the very few architects and artists whose work you can survey and say immediately “that was done by Charles Rennie Mackintosh”.

Glasgow School of Art and Hill House in Helensburgh are the best known buildings to have survived from his most fruitful period of production between 1895 and 1906, and they display in abundance the superb draughtsmanship and brilliant imagination that he brought to his very finest work. The National Trust for Scotland have announced that they will be seeking £4 million next year to make Hill House a permanently watertight building to preserve its astounding interiors – Mackintosh was a victim of a fad for ultimately porous Portland cement at the start of the 1900s that left many an architect, not to mention building owners, damply frustrated and Hill House’s harling was no exception.

It was a rare mistake by Mackintosh to use Portland cement, but he could not be blamed as no one knew that it was never going to resist the weather on the Firth of Clyde.

Mackintosh knew the West of Scotland intimately as it formed him. Born in Townhead in Glasgow on June 7, 1868 – thus the 150th anniversary of his birth will be celebrated next summer – Mackintosh was the second son and fourth child in all of the 11 born to police superintendent William Mackintosh, or McIntosh, and his wife Margaret Rennie. Charles was given the middle name Rennie after his mother’s maiden name but in an unsual move, and just like his father, he later abandoned the spelling McIntosh that is on his birth certificate and became Mackintosh, as his father did before him.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh attended Reid’s Public School and the Allan Glen’s Institution before beginning his training as an architect. In those days entering the profession was done via an apprenticeship and Mackintosh landed lucky by getting a pupillage with the established practice of John Hutchison. At the same time, Mackintosh enrolled in classes at the Glasgow School of Art as a 15-year-old. He would be a student there for 11 years in total and it would be a profoundly significant part of his life.

He won the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship in 1890 and used it to travel round Europe which greatly broadened his attitudes and experience. The roots of his European Modernism can be traced to that time.

On completing his apprenticeship, Mackintosh moved to the partnership of John Honeyman and Keppie, starting there at the age of 21. He was already noted for his excellent draughtsmanship as he had won several top design competition prizes as a student.

We do not have a true picture of what Mackintosh did during his time as assistant to the two partners, but we do know that he was heavily involved in the design of the famous Glasgow Herald building in Mitchell Street. He wrote to a friend in publishing: “Although the building in Mitchell Street here was designed by me the architects are or were Messrs Honeyman & Keppie – who employ me as assistant. So if you reproduce any photographs of the building you must give the architects’ name – not mine. You will see that this is very unfortunate for me, but I hope when brighter days come I shall be able to work for myself entirely and claim my work as mine.”

That duly happened. In 1896, Honeyman and Keppie won the right to design the Free Church of St Matthew in Glasgow and allocated the task to Mackintosh. It would become his only church design and for the first time the stained glass windows that would become a feature of his work were shown to the public – it is now the home of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.

The church opened in 1899, by which time Mackintosh was already working on the design for the Glasgow School of Art where he had once been a student. This would prove to be his masterpiece, and made his name across Europe – his designs with their leanings to Art Nouveau and Japonisme much influenced by Japanese form and functionality were lionised at exhibitions on the Continent, but less so in Britain.

WHAT was he like, what was his style, what was his unique approach? I am not an architectural expert so at this point we look to a recent interview given by Stuart Robertson, director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, who explained: “Mackintosh saw his work as whole, as a story in which every detail was important, didn’t believe in compromise. He didn’t like it if he didn’t get his own way and could be very forthright in trying to achieve that. By all accounts he wasn’t the easiest person to get on with but had a real sense of humour and children loved him but he wasn’t the type of man who went on the golf course to get a contract.

“He had just four or five patrons who commissioned him and kept him going and he wasn’t beating around the bush to get others. He gave lectures that heavily criticised Scottish architecture that leant heavily on classic Greek and Roman influence, as he believed in going forward. Of course this didn’t make him that popular with either fellow architects or those who commissioned them.

“He had a futuristic approach. You’d walk up this very industrial, very polluted street in Glasgow and enter this tea room that would whisk you away to Africa or Japan. That whole idea of escapist architecture was very much ahead of its time. He integrated Japanese European art and presented this simple uncluttered style that was the opposite of Victorian which was fussy, dark and over-ornamental.

“He also played with natural light and investigated how the light fell before he designed a house. He never explained his symbolism, as that’s for you to work out, but the feeling of calm is evident.”

Mackintosh’s greatest collaborator was his wife, the artist and designer Margaret Macdonald, who he met while a student. With her artist sister Frances and Herbert MacNair, also an artist and designer, they formed the Glasgow Four – irreverently nicknamed the Spook School due to their designs – which played a very influential role in the Glasgow Style practised also by the Glasgow Girls and Glasgow Boys groups of artists.

Margaret’s input into the interiors for the Willow Tearooms (1903) and Hill House (1904) showed they were a true partnership, and their work was hugely popular.

Then suddenly nothing. After he created the famous Scotland Street School (1906) and completed the art school in 1907, Mackintosh’s architecture withered away. Simply put, he wanted total control with Margaret over every job, and clients were becoming wary of his stubbornness, not to mention being scared off at the utterly modernist “aesthetic” way his designs were heading. It was all too much for the moneyed classes.

He and Margaret never had children and this was known to be painful to both of them but that and their failing income – work all but dried up in pre-war Glasgow – does not explain fully explain why they both took off to England, first to London and then to Suffolk.

It was there in 1915 that Mackintosh was arrested as a potential German spy, mostly because of the letters in German that he got from his friends and fans on the Continent where he was still revered. It took him a week to prove he was no German agent.

In 1919, Mackintosh designed 78 Derngate in Northampton which is still beautifully preserved. It was his only house in England and his last commission of any scale.

Now facing problems with money and alcohol, Mackintosh decided to break with Britain and moved to the south of France to Port Vendres where they lived on Margaret’s private income and he spent his days painting watercolours that were only later recognised to be of superior quality.

In 1927, Charles Rennie Mackintosh succumbed to cancer at the age of 60. He was cremated and his ashes scattered at Golders Green. Margaret died five years later.

His reputation did not really soar again until the 1970s and by the following decade, Mackintosh-inspired designs were all the rage – so much so that Glasgow’s successful bid to be European City of Culture was said to owe much to his reputation abroad. The city repaid him by finally getting around to building House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park.

Over recent decades, Glasgow and Scotland have come to love Mackintosh as one of our own, a wayward genius. Yet any appreciation of him cannot fail to deduce that he could have done much more had his genius been recognised in his lifetime.