Mackintosh, Charles Rennie

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie (măk`əntŏsh'), 1868–1928, Scottish architect, artist, and furniture designer. Probably the greatest architect and designer Scotland has produced, he attempted to create a native style for the modern era. His decorative and graphic works are some of the finest manifestations of art nouveau while also being beautiful examples of early modernism. His few buildings are notable for their absence of external decoration and their subtlety of proportion—both qualities partially derived from Scottish medieval precedent and from the Scottish Baronial style of the 16th and 17th cent. Among these buildings are the Glasgow School of Art (1899, additional wing 1909), widely considered his masterwork; Queen's Cross Church, Glasgow; and two country houses—"Windyhill," Kilmacolm, and "Hill House," Helensburgh—both built around the turn of the century.

As a designer, Mackintosh was influenced in his early work by the English arts and crafts movement and, like the members of that school, he strove to integrate architectural and decorative elements in his work. Among his finest interiors were those executed for several turn-of-the-century Glasgow tea rooms. The sole survivor, the Willow Tea Room (1904), was restored and reopened in 1983. Many of his designs, often incorporating squares and stylized roses and other plant forms, were created in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Best known of his stark, elegant, and often beautifully detailed furniture designs are graceful wooden chairs with extremely high backs. He also designed other furniture, stained glass, murals, and clocks. His work influenced such important 20th-century figures as Josef Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bibliography

See Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Architectural Papers (1990), ed. by P. Robertson; studies by T. Howarth (1952) and A. Crawford (1995); E. Wilhide, The Mackintosh Style (1995).

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Mackintosh, Charles Rennie

(born June 7, 1868, Glasgow, Scot.—died Dec. 10, 1928, London, Eng.) Scottish architect, furniture designer, and artist. A giant of the Arts and Crafts Movement, he is especially revered for his glass-and-stone studio building at the Glasgow School of Art (1896–1909), where he had attended classes. In the 1890s he achieved an international reputation creating unorthodox posters, craftwork, and furniture. Considered Britain's first designer of true Art Nouveau architecture, he produced work of an unrivaled lightness, elegance, and originality, as exemplified by four remarkable tearooms he designed in Glasgow (1896–1904). By 1914 he was dedicating all his energies to watercolour painting. The late 20th century saw a revival of interest in his work and the manufacture of reproductions of his chairs and settees, which were characterized by starkly simple geometric lines.

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Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 

Born June 7, 1868, in Glasgow; died Dec. 10, 1928, in London. Scottish architect.

Mackintosh worked in Glasgow and London. In his buildings he achieved a flexibility and elegance of design that reveal the aesthetically expressive possibilities of construction design and building materials. His chief work was the Glasgow School of Art (1898-1909). Mackintosh was an architect in the style of art nouveau and as such exerted an important influence on the development of rationalism in Great Britain, Germany, and Austria. As a member of the association of artist-designers known as ’The Four” (organized in 1890), Mackintosh concerned himself with interior decoration and furniture design.

REFERENCE

Howarth, T. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement. London, 1952.