Mackintosh Queen's Cross

Mackintosh Queen's Cross - Table of Contents

Church Hall - Mackintosh Queen's Cross
870 Garscube Road, Glasgow, Scotland

Mackintosh Queen's Cross - Official Website

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (U.K., 1868–1928)

At the turn of the 20th century, the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh created a singular, wholly original design style that was both lyrical and sleekly modern. Within his architectural schemes for schools, private homes and restaurants, Mackintosh — frequently working in collaboration with his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald — invented an aesthetic that blends the organic flow of the Art Nouveau style and the honest simplicity of the English Arts & Crafts movement.

Mackintosh was born into a working-class Glasgow family, the fourth of the 11 children of a police clerk and his wife. At age 15, Mackintosh began to take night classes at the Glasgow School of Art — where he would study until 1894 — and the following year started an apprenticeship with local architect John Hutchison.

At the GSA, Mackintosh befriended Macdonald, her sister, Frances, and fellow architecture student Herbert McNair. Together they formed a graphic design team known as the Four, and were admired for their illustrations featuring sinuous botanical forms and sylph-like women.

Around the same time, Mackintosh was hired by the architectural firm Honeyman and Keppie. where he drafted the company’s winning design for a new GSA building. The structure, with its brooding, asymmetrical facade punctuated by soaring studio windows, would be his architectural masterwork.

By 1900, Mackintosh was designing houses and began the interiors for a group of Glasgow tea parlors in which he and Macdonald would produce some of the most alluring, lushly graphic decors of the era. Mackintosh’s work became widely influential on the continent, particularly among Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and other member of the Vienna Secession movement.