Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), Scottish architect and designer, whose chaste, functional style exerted a strong influence on 20th-century architecture and interior design.

Born June 7, 1868, in Glasgow, and trained at the Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh rejected overdecorated Victorian styles in favor of a spare simplicity that featured geometric shapes and unadorned surfaces. Between 1899 and 1910 he designed several houses near Glasgow in this style, but his fame rests primarily on his designs for the Glasgow School of Art (1897-1899), with its austere rectangular framework, long, simple curves, and unornamented facade. His later addition of a library (1906-1909) was based entirely on straight lines and right angles: Its horizontal beams alternate with vertical pillars in a vigorous, rhythmic juxtaposition.

Mackintosh was also an important interior designer, and from 1897 to 1912 he created the design scheme for the Cranston chain of tearooms in Glasgow. His furniture, usually painted white with delicately colored stencils of stylized flower patterns and occasional insets of amethyst glass, combines attenuated straight lines with subtle curves. The designs, although unmistakably art nouveau, avoided the excesses found in the work of some Continential practitioners of the style. This appealed to avant-garde designers such as the members of the Vienna Secession (see Sezessionstil). Mackintosh exhibited in 1900 at the Secessionist Exhibition in Vienna, where his designs gained an international following. His work exerted an important influence on the growing 20th-century trend toward simplification and functionalism. Mackintosh, all but forgotten, died in London, December 10, 1928; decades later, his work achieved a permanent place in the history of design. In the late 1970s the Mackintosh House, his studio-home in Glasgow, was reconstructed and opened as a museum.