The surviving shell of Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building, devastated by fire last weekend, is expected to be saved from demolition, council officials have said.
Senior figures in Glasgow city council said a consensus was emerging among building control officers, the art school and Historic Environment Scotland (HES), the official conservation agency, that the landmark should be saved.
The 110-year-old building, an art nouveau, grade A-listed masterpiece designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was gutted by a fire that tore through it and two neighbouring venues on Friday night and into Saturday morning.
A third of the Mackintosh, including its library, suffered significant damage in a previous fire four years ago and the building was undergoing a £35m renovation. Doubts had been raised about whether its exterior stonework could survive a second blaze.
Fire crews are still working on the last remaining hotspots and are not expected to allow investigators, damage assessors and structural engineers into the structure until Wednesday at the earliest.
Building control officers and HES have been comparing the building’s walls and roof joists with a very detailed 3D digital scan of the building to establish how significant the damage is to its sandstone walls.
A council spokesman said: “The external fabric of the building appears to be saveable except for the eastern gable, which appears to have shifted slightly. This is because the walls are tied together by the roof.”
The eastern gable could still be saved, he said, perhaps by taking it apart brick by brick and rebuilding it if the rest of the structure was salvageable.
“There is a consensus emerging that the intention of the building control people, HES people and the art school is to save the building,” he said. “Right now, people are operating on the understanding it will be saveable.”
He said that did not mean at this stage that a decision had been made to entirely reconstruct the art school to Mackintosh’s original design. Many fixtures and fittings that were being remade as part of the 2014 restoration are stored at another site.
While the UK and Scottish governments have pledged financial support to any restoration project, building experts speculate that could cost £100m or more. Some believe it would require demolition.
Alan Dunlop, an architect who trained at Glasgow School of Art and is now a professor of architecture at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said the Mackintosh building was now gone and should not be rebuilt.
“We should resist the calls to rebuild it as before stone by stone. That would not be restoration, it would be replication, a process I believe Mackintosh himself would resist as he was an innovator not a copyist,” he said.
The council spokesman said the city had built a new Mackintosh building long after his death: the House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park was built in 1996, entirely to a Mackintosh design.
Kier Group, the construction company contracted to carry out the restoration after the 2014 fire and which was still in control of the Mackintosh when it caught fire last week, said it supported any new reconstruction project.
There were no operational sprinklers at the site but a Kier spokeswoman said a fire strategy had been in place for the renovation and reconstruction. It included a smoke and heat detection system, round-the-clock security and fire patrols by a team of three guards.
Susan Aitken, the council’s leader, said officials were considering whether to include the Mackintosh rebuild within a wider strategy already under way to revitalise neighbouring Sauchiehall Street, including the O2 ABC music venue and Campus nightclub, which were badly damaged in the latest fire.
It may include aggressive use of compulsory purchase powers to take control of unsalvageable buildings and build a much larger arts and entertainment campus alongside Glasgow School of Art. The council’s Sauchiehall Street taskforce is meeting to discuss its strategy on Tuesday.