Fires and Financial Trouble Leave the Fate of Two Arts Institutions Uncertain in This Scottish City—Including a Century-Old Masterpiece

The historic Glasgow School of Art and the more modern Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts were both affected by a significant blaze in 2018

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

August 6, 2026 11:35 a.m.

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Art and architecture lovers in Scotland’s most populous city have two sources of worry these days. The future is uncertain for a pair of Glasgow’s significant arts institutions, located around the corner from each other.

The Glasgow School of Art, which was founded in 1845, suffered significant damage in a fire in 2018, after already enduring a different blaze in 2014. Its home for the past century, a stone Art Nouveau building by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is “one of Britain’s most celebrated buildings” and considered a masterpiece, reports Alex Marshall for the New York Times.

But the school announced this July that it can’t afford to restore the burned building to working condition. Architecture experts hope that a solution can be found, perhaps with government funds.

“This is a building that influenced world architecture and changed Victorian traditionalism into modernism,” Gordon Gibb, a former director of professional studies at the school’s architecture department, tells the Times. “We have detailed records of every part of it,” he adds, “so it should be brought back.”

Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868. After apprenticing with architects, he enrolled at the school and won student prizes for his work. In 1896, Mackintosh earned a commission to design a new building for the school, which came to be viewed as the first original example of Art Nouveau architecture in Great Britain.

The library, now damaged, was one of the school’s “most dramatic” interiors, according to the nonprofit Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, which calls it a “complex space of timber posts and beams.”

“Any visitor to the space could not help but be moved by its architectural and aesthetic beauty, from its hand-painted balusters to its pierced wooden pendants, and from its colored-glass hanging lamps, to its original tables, Windsor chairs and periodicals desk,” wrote Duncan Chappell, academic liaison librarian at the school, in 2014. “Its vast west windows, rising up through three levels of the building, had been compared to those at York Minster.”

Meanwhile, an arts space from the other end of the 20th century, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), closed earlier this year, raising questions about what will happen to its archives. These incorporate photographs, posters, films, writings, and recordings—including of Allen Ginsberg, Ivor Cutler, Julius Eastman and Lewis Mahalo—from more than a half-century of creative cultivation in Glasgow.

The CCA space had been a haven for musicians and artists of myriad disciplines. It first housed the Third Eye Centre, founded by Scottish musician and writer Tom McGrathin the 1970s, which was a “a shrine to the avant garde,” Mark Fisher wrote for the Guardian in 2009. The venue hosted Whoopi Goldberg, John Byrne, Edwin Morgan and Kathy Acker; presented art exhibitions by Ken Currie, Steven Campbell, and Peter Howson; and was the home of the National Review of Live Art.

“When the Third Eye was here in the 1970s there was nothing like that in the city,” former CCA director Francis McKee told the Scotland Herald in 2015.

In the early 1990s, Third Eye closed and the CCA was established in its place.

Financial insecurity lately has plagued the contemporary arts institution, which has had to close its doors several times in the past few years. The CCA’s building is owned by Creative Scotland, a public entity.

In response to concerns about what would happen to the center’s collections, Màiri McAllan, Scottish secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic, says, “I have been crystal clear that the archive of the Third Eye Centre and Centre for Contemporary Arts should be retained in whole and available to the public, given its incredible cultural significance to Glasgow and Scotland,” reports Jane Bradley for the Scotsman.

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.