Glasgow School of Art is one of the great works of arts and crafts architecture of the turn of the century. Charles Rennie Mackintosh's response to a difficult site and demanding brief is a creative synthesis of opposites: austere and delicate, dark and bright, derivative yet innovative. Whilst the exterior impression is one of imposing grandeur, the building's sombre facade and towering outer wall owe much to the Scottish baronial tradition and the interior reveals itself to b a lively and complex set of spaces. Although quoting art nouveau in some of the detailing, the overall effect looks forward rather than back; indeed Nikolaus Pevsner was to single out the interior as an early example of the sort of spatial effects which were later to be central to the modern movement.
