 Yeah we can see the room filling up, well we have a big turnout today and so we'll wait a little bit for people to come in, we can start. I'd say we can make a start now Shreya. Yeah we have 100 participants already so I think we can, that's a good quorum. And we can get started. So just to say welcome to the Paul Mellon Centre Spring Research Lunch Series, we have a really exciting talk today and thank you all for coming. It's a really big turnout for a research lunch and we're very excited to have you here. So we're going to be hearing today about Charles Rene McIntosh from Ronald Lawrence, who's going to be talking about McIntosh's gift for spatial invention and how that was combined with the latest technology to specifically to create a new kind of what Ronald calls a tempered environment, which was unprecedented in its sophistication. I think I will just sort of introduce Ronald now and then let him do all the talking. So Ronald Lawrence is lecturer in architecture at the University of Liverpool. He trained as an architect and has worked with award-winning architectural practices as a designer and researcher. His research examines the history of environmental design and the relationship between buildings and climate in different cultural contexts. So before I hand over to Ronald, it would be really helpful if we could run through some housekeeping. And for that, not too many points. The talk will last approximately 45 minutes and then we'll be followed by Q&A. Audience members can type questions using the Q&A function and we encourage you to ask questions. We have time and I'm sure Ronald will be very happy to respond to your questions. The session will be recorded and made available to the public. Close captioning is available. Click the CC button on your screen to enable captions. And so with that, over to you, Ronald. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. To my presentation. Is that showing up okay? That's great, thanks. Perfect. Perfect, thank you. Okay, hi everyone. Thanks very much for the invitation to speak to you today. It's a real privilege to be able to talk to you about the Glasgow School of Arts, which how do you measure this, right? But I think it's the best building in the world. And I was just thinking, it doesn't seem so long ago that I finished my PhD thesis on the art school, but it was eight years ago. My PhD was looking at contextualizing the building within a sort of broader history of art education and the climate of the Victorian city. And I remember the day of my Viva had James Campbell and Colin Portiers from the art school in Glasgow and we were having a very good conversation about the building and its ventilation systems and that was the day of the first fire. It was sort of severely damaged the west end of the building with the library. And of course since then has been a second fire. It's kind of devastated the building, which is a great shame. But here's the North facade to the art school on Renfrew Street before the fire and English arts and crafts. You normally think of sort of elegant picturesque country houses, Bailey Scott or Charles Voisay or even, you know, Macintosh's Hill House out in Helensburg. And this is, I think, much more urban, much more industrial using new materials like steel and concrete and plate glass. But there's a bit of a puzzle here too, from an environmental perspective, which is how do you keep the enormous volumes of these studio spaces facing north warm enough. But I want to start first though with a bit of an overview of where these buildings come from, including the urban environment that we're dealing with. I'm going to try and walk you through the school and explain how the environmental systems of the building work has designed and then make some comments maybe about its significance and draw some conclusions. So to start from the beginning, this is the Royal Academy founded in 1768. The first serious art school, if you like in Britain, will be a school of fine rather than practical art. So at this time, our classes were a luxury unless you were well off, you needed a job to pay for them. So classes were often held in the evening or at night. And everyone would share the cost of the model and the fuel for the heat and the light. And you would all sit round and study the subject and this is perhaps the beginning of that idea of quitting, right, where you compare what you've done with the person next to you at the end of the session. And as studio practice became formalized, people started to ask, well, what actually is the most appropriate environment for an art school. The Royal Academy moved into the Great Exhibition Room of Sunset House, which you can see here designed by William Chambers in 1779. And this really sort of established precedent of top light from a from a lantern as being the most appropriate light for viewing art. In 1834, the Royal Academy moved, of course, into the new building, the new Gaslet National Gallery, and that freed up this space for the first government school of design. What's interesting about that is it's the first time the government, if you like, directly involved itself in higher education. So it's really about the origins of the polytechnic compared to the university. The School of Design was about drawing things to be made and sold for commerce and industry. Though there were a lot of disputes about exactly how you do that, what that should entail. So after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the profits were spent on the construction of the Museum of Manufactures. And the rest of the set of Kensington, Gore estate in West London, which was managed by a new department established the Department of Science and Art. They were also tasked with expanding art education, the benefits of art education to all the regions of Britain. And this was justified in response to concerns about the quality of British industry products compared, comparing products with like French and German goods at the Great Exhibition. There was concerns about Britain lagging behind it sort of European rivals. So this is the new School of Design that was built in a wing behind the north and south courts of the V&A by Francis Fowke completed in 1863. And already those windows folding into the roof are starting to look quite familiar. So we have to remember the skies could be a lot darker of course in the late 19th century. This is the Wingleman smoke chart, and the black lines literally represent 20, 40, 60 and 80% blackness. And what you would do is you would take this chart and you would hold it up to this, up to the smoke coming out the chimney and you'd sort of go well, 70% black today and that's that's okay or we've got to, we've got to give them a feel fine because that's too much smoke. The problem was a lot more pronounced in northern cities. So one study that was measuring annual suit fall that like the weather forecast at the turn of the 20th century and about 1900 measured 426 tons of suit falling per square mile in London, compared with 820 in Glasgow so almost twice as much if you imagine those kind of descriptions of the Kenzie of London, make it twice as bad. And I thought I thought I'd throw this in here. I'm sure you're all familiar with money's sort of atmospheric views of the Thames. This is Adolphalette painting the River Medlock in Manchester in 1912 with this kind of haunting beauty and the smog. And it wasn't just artistic license so here's a very early photograph of encotes in Manchester in the 1870s with all of these back to back terraced houses cheap by Joe with the, with the factories in the mills. Here's the new School of Art in Manchester then which was the first big new school to open outside of London. It opened in April 1881 designed by a guy called George Tomstall Redman, who was a former pupil, and then brother in law of Alfred Waterhouse. So, so Victorian pretensions to keep here we can see in the facade, but you might notice that that large skylight at roof level all the way along the north facing slope of that roof. That's lighting the main studio space you can see here. Originally the gallery of cast so collection of plaster casts that you could buy from South Kensington, but essentially the drawing studio. This is from Birmingham School of Art, designed by Chamberlain and Martin completed in September 1885 so four years after Manchester, with an extension from 1893, which you can just see further down the road. And the orientation of this building to the southwest means a much more sort of complicated lighting arrangement in the building in Manchester. So to catch the North light, you can see that the studios and the wings at either end of the building if you can see my mouse. I've got these kind of glaze skylights folding into the roof on the Northwest side only. This building on the half level. So through this quite dark and birding entrance porch into the heart of the building, the space that they call the museum space on the right here animated by direct sunlight. And then there's a sequence of spaces that you move through from the outside world into this kind of dark, sober protected interior away from the noise and the dirt and the smoke of the city outside. And the daylight flooding down the staircases at either end of the main corridor there, drawing your upwards and you move back up to the light with these glass galleries at the back of the building which give access to sort of all the main studio spaces. This is the antique room with that folded skylight to the Northwest or drawing from the antique at one end of the building, and you enter in the middle of the room from the corridor. And that's a glass window wall folding into the pitch of the roof sort of fills the space with bright daylight. This is art laboratory for cartoon and figure design, and the, the tall sort of glass panes of the window here you can see turn up towards the sky. Diffusing light right across the working plane of the space. So our gas lights you can just see in the top of the picture there for working at night which were also connected to the, to the ventilation system of the building. If anyone tuning in is from Birmingham knows Birmingham very well you'll know all of the, all of the board schools designed by Chamberlain and Martin have these fantastic sort of Gothic chimneys rising up. And that's all about ventilation for the classrooms. And it's not too difficult then to see the influence of these buildings on the school in Glasgow this is the composition room above the library and the art school in Glasgow. And you see the sort of contrast here between the plate glass skylights and the roof. And this typical Macintosh Bay window there with the small rolled glass panes beneath and it's about the difference between openings for light and windows to frame a view of the city outside. So Francis Newberry who was the headmaster at Glasgow visited Birmingham and London in 1893. Just before he drew up the block plan for the school in Glasgow and Macintosh visited the schools in Birmingham and London as well as he was working on his plans for the second phase of the school in 1909. So the school in Glasgow was constructed in two phases, the eastern portion between 1897 and 1899. And here there's the only photograph of that building without without the western half completing it. And then the western portion between 1907 and 1910. There's a sketch of the western portion, the second phase of the building under construction from Socky Hall Street at the bottom of the hill. And there's something about this view now that some is kind of like a ruin of a tower house that's slightly reminiscent about how the building looks certainly after the first fire know it's now it's hidden underneath that mountain of scaffolding unfortunately. So here's the north elevation of the school again and, and you might think it was designed in one go. But actually the studio is to the roof as well as added with the second phase of the buildings where my mouse is at the moment. The south facade is in a way far more revealing about Macintosh's evolution as an architect from a year out student he was only 28 or 29 when he designed the first phase of the building here to a fully trained architect. So coming back 10 years later with a unique opportunity to reflect on what he's done, and you can see that the building is far more punctured there's a lot more potential for the sun coming from the south to penetrate into the spaces of the building and animate them. And so I'm going to try and walk and draw you through the building. This is, this usually is quite entertaining so. Here's the fantastic thing about school courses. It was still an art school until eight years ago, until the fire stone gets scuffed by paint from people so taking canvases in and out the door and you move from this little porch with a pair of black doors one in and one out. So these white doors and the inside and I like to think this is about moving from the sort of smoky dirty world outside into this kind of idealized vision of a, of a totally, a totally designed future inside. So I'm just going to jump over to Microsoft paint. I'm just going to try and size, size my window to match. So you can see what I'm doing. I'm going to line that up for you. I've given I've given myself a little guide I'm just trying to just trying to copy there. I was going to do this with my, with my graphic parts, but the pens book and so I'm now going to try and freehand draw with my computer mouse, which probably isn't going to work. It's going to be some entertainment. So we're at the top of the Garnet Hill in Glasgow. And here's the footprint of the building. So about 23 meters by 75 meters. 75 meters. This is a long axis. This way, if I can draw like that, it's not the best drawing tool. And anyone who's visited the school knows that we're at the top of a very steep hill that's going down to Socke Hall Street down below. It's a medium of almost sort of one in four. And the fantastic thing about the building is you enter in the middle here. That's that pair of black doors that you go through, but you enter in the middle and plan, but also in section right because you come up from the pavement. There are three baroque flights of stairs like this. At the half level again, just like the precedents in Manchester and Birmingham. And there's a basement level down here that you can see from the pavement. This is quite interesting. It's a bit mind bending to look at the elevation of the front of the building, which is symmetrical. So you've got these stone pillars that form the railing to the street. And I just switch back to my slides. You can see that's perfectly symmetrical if you just look at the front door and where those pillars and the railings are, but then have a look at the studio windows behind. And it's not symmetrical and you can still step at that all day and try and figure out what's going on and how it works, but it does work somehow. You come into the entrance here into a kind of dark hallway here in the plan, the left hand side. What you can't see is you're actually above the boiler and the basement underneath you. So the darkness of that space is matched by the warmth coming up from under your feet in that space. So you've got this sense of enclosure and protection from the wind and the rain and howling gale outside. And you can see directly in front of you the main staircase leading you up into the space, so drawing you up into the heart of the building on the right hand side there. And that's at the back here. So you go up to the half level where you've got like a little landing and then return and back up again to here. I don't want to spend too much time down in the basement but the stair also goes down to the basement so you can go down underneath. There's a key to understanding your way around the building, the circulation around the building is, you can almost split it, lengthways and half like that. And there's a corridor to the east and to the west. And if you go down into the basement, that corridor takes you along here to the base of this tower in the southwest corner, which was originally the lecture hall of the building so there was a podium there and a series of benches that you could sit on there to see speakers inside that space. But we'll go on up the stairs so you come up this stair and you arrive in the middle of a big room here, which is the museum, like the space in Birmingham. And that's 18 meters by 11 meters by 7 meters high. So something like that. And I'll show you what that space is like. There we are. And it says if you're back outside again, right, so you've got this, you've got this fantastic roof light over your head. And secondly, it's an idealized version of the outside is this clean, warm and bright environment for viewing art. And what we've got on the right hand side here is a false color luminance photograph off the space. So taking taking photographs of the space with different exposures to sort of get an accurate quantitative measure of the luminance, which is the brightness of the surfaces. And you can see that almost perfect even like cast on the walls for displaying for displaying pictures in this space. I'll try and add that there for you across the roof. And from the museum. You. These corridors extends again, I should explain that the first, the first portion of the building had three main studios. So equally side equally sized here. Facing to the north. And at ground level. Maybe I'll pick up a blue. They have these windows. And these were the junior classes for painting and drawing and then repeated again at first floor level. And that's where you get those fantastic enormous windows. That you can see from the street outside. So this is the most valuable real estate in the building for painting and fine art. And if you go down into the basement. They filled in the gap between the building and the pavement here, and you've got workshops down in that space, let by these lights to the street like that. And there's an interesting story why they built why they only built why they built building in two halves. So there was a competition that was announced to to design the building and the budget that was announced was 15,000 pounds. So that's the extent of the first phase of the building that I'm just highlighting an orange there. 10 of the big Glasgow firms entered and they sort of all all started chatting to each other this happens about what their ideas were and they sort of realized that it was impossible that none of them could could meet the requirements of the brief and design this building for such a small budget. So they looked to the competition organizers and said, we can't build this building for 15,000 pounds. You're going to need to sort of lower your ambitions here or up the budget. And so the competition organizers got back and said, we'll tell you what, design the whole building and just mark on the plan the bit that we could build for 15,000 and we'll, we'll think about the second half later. So that's what that's what happens. That's the first half of the building and then when it comes to building the second portion, the plan repeats itself. But there's four studios in this way, which explains the asymmetry of the, of the windows to the North facade. Two here, three. And that ground level. So I have missed out ground here. You get the junior architecture school that turns the corner of the lecture theater here with its smaller windows, six windows to that elevation there with those skylights to the workshops in the basement underneath. So here's one of those studio spaces. And there's a kind of average daylight factor across that space of about 8%, which is sort of very impressive by modern standards. But then of course we have to remember it would have been much gloomier at the time because of the smoke but as you can see again from the illuminance photograph that the studio is basically designed as a light box. So here's a contemporary photograph from 1900, and the windows are to the left of this shot and you can see how they can divide the space up drawing curtains across and adjusting the lights, sort of hung on them on this system of ropes from the ceiling. You get these beautiful cast window brackets on the facade that you might think are just there for decoration but it's, it's boards for the window cleaners who have to have to come and wash the windows every few weeks to to make sure there's enough light getting it and it's not getting too dirty. So the North light from those studios is sort of matched by contrasted with the South light you get shining into the corridors on the South side. Three windows in this corridor giving you views from the top of the hill back down over the city and the Clyde beyond. And you get these little seating carols, basically almost like, almost like pews or little bits of furniture, little wardrobe so you can climb into next to the window. You can sit in sort of rest and there you are enjoying the sun shining through. And it does work out from between the clouds, which occasionally does in Glasgow. And here's the section through the building. And you can see also how Macintosh is sort of borrowing light from the sky to light the rooms in the basement but also the main studios. But what I really want to talk to you about now is the sort of ventilation system. So the key to really understanding the environment of the building but I think also the architectural experience of the building is this great spine wall that runs down the centre of the section in the plan. It's about six or 700 millimetres thick. I try and find another colour. Let's go for green. And it runs the entire length of the building and rises all the way up. And you can see this in all of Macintosh's buildings. If you look at his houses, it adopts that sort of classic arts and crafts approach where the spaces are disposed according to the movements of the sun. So the kitchen which is nice and hot and warm anyway will be to the north side. The main living rooms, the main living spaces will be to the south. The bedrooms might be orientated to sort of catch the west side of the evening to warm the space up. But what we have underneath the entrance, if you remember, if you remember how I described the boilers were underneath the entrance. There's two enormous fan wheels and they're about seven or eight foot in diameter, powered by an electric motor. And this draws air into the building underneath the main entrance stair from the street. And the first thing that happens is the air is drawn through a series of screens made of horse hair here. And you can drop, you can drip water down those screens. And the idea was to sort of try and remove the sort of suit and the dust from the outside to clean the air, but you can also adjust the amount of water to humidify the air. And it then is drawn through a series of steam water pipes that are connected to the boilers. So the building was installed with eight boilers in total. And you could turn them on and off to adjust the temperature. And those fans would then take the air down underneath the basement corridor and underneath the basement corridor. There was a sort of tapering cleaner tapering duct that runs the entire length of the building. So it's too small for me to draw this accurately, but it would taper from the bigger sort of cross section at the center up to a narrow dimension at the corner. You can see that in the section here. And from that, from that plan on the air would be distributed up these vertical ducts into the studios in the different spaces to the north and south of the spine wall. So it's effectively the half of the building, a space you can sort of get closer to in winter to stay warm or cool in summer. Believe it or not, they had an electric ice making machine in the basement as well. So it was possible to cool the air. So it meets all of the technical definitions of air conditioning, which wasn't invented from another two or three decades by Willis Carrier. You can humidify the air, you can cool it, you can heat it, you can vary its volume. The one thing you can't do is dehumidify the air. But then in each of the spaces, if you see this photograph in the bottom left hand corner there, you would have these drawers on the wall that you could pull all the way open or halfway open or closed to vary the amount of air coming into each of the spaces. So very simple mechanical system, but somehow far more sophisticated than responsive than what we're used to today, right? Fighting a thermostat on the wall. Why isn't this working? I need to wait an hour before the temperature changes. And if you look at Macintosh's original drawings off the school on the plans, you can see in quite careful detail, he understands and he knows all of these arrows are either inlets or outlets from the docks in that spine wall rising up the centre of the building. And the sort of thermal qualities of the spaces to either side of that wall reflect its orientation. So these large volumes to the north side, these studios would be cooler spaces where you would feel like you want to stand up and be active and do a painting, do some sculpture. Whereas the spaces to the south side are generally smaller in volume and more cozy and more reflective spaces where you can sit in the library and read a book or have your lunch. So during what we might now call the sort of commissioning phase or the testing phase of the school, the architects. So it detailed various alterations and adjustments they were making to the air system. And they tested the system to demonstrate that it met the specifications off the school over a week in the beginning of March in 1910. So over 100 years ago, but about now, and we can see the temperatures here that the testing took when the testing was undertaken about eight or nine degrees outside, that's that dark blue line at the bottom. The red line is the temperatures as they are adjusting them in the boiler and at the fan. So the air that they were supplying into the spaces between 14 and 26, 27 degrees in the morning when it was colder. You could maintain the studio spaces at around 16 or 17 degrees. That's the gray and blue line here. And they said that was fine. They said, we've only turned on three of the eight boilers. It's a cold sort of winters day in the beginning of March in Glasgow, and it's 16 degrees, which is the temperature you would want it to be. Which is incredible if you think about what we've grown accustomed to today, 21 22 degrees, our perceptions of what what is comfortable has changed over over only a century. We now expect temperatures to be five or six degrees warmer, except for the gray line at the top here at 22 degrees. And there's a comment that is possible to adjust the system to, to, to, to rise the temperature or lower it in different studios as you might as might be required. And that's actually the life drawing room. So this will be someone in there without any clothes on who wants to be a little bit warmer and they could, they could accommodate that in the operation of the building. While Manchester and Birmingham were originally lit by gas, the school in Glasgow was originally designed with electric light so there were 272 light fittings in the building. Mostly 16 candle power lamps, which is about 10 watts and incandescent sort of currency. It's very dim compared with modern lights. So that explains why you would have sort of maybe 16 716 1820 lamps in every room, or the equivalent for about to kind of quite bright 100 watt equivalent incandescent bulbs. And the school struck a deal with the Glasgow Corporation for cheap electricity between 715 and 915 in the evening. So if you can see how, how the wiring is hung from the ceiling off the studio using these metal hooks, and that was in case of fire. So these bulbs these early bulbs tended to sort of go bang quite dramatically and often would set the flex on fire so you don't want to set the, the timber of the building on fire at the same time. So you can quickly take you back to, to this message drawing that to understand the plan of the building then. I hope you've got a sense of these studios to the north side the spine wall the museum in the center, and also to the south. You get these kind of two towers so it's kind of really E shaped and plan. This is the West Tower. So lecture hall at the bottom architecture school above and then you come to the library, which is a fantastic sort of triple height space double height space sorry, but the windows are triple height, interestingly. And you get these three really tall bay windows facing west. And the best description I've heard of that space the library comes from. Thomas Howard's biography where he describes it as a, as a glade and the tropics and the, and the forest in the center and the heart of Scotland. You can sit in the forest and read your book with the light dappling down. What can it first floor level sort of maps around the space, supporting the big shelves. I'm just going to try and do you a doodle of the section. Yeah, wobbly through the north side of the building. So here's the pavement. And you've got that. I should pick a different color. You've got that skylight that lets light down into the workshops down here. You've got the studios at ground floor for the junior classes and the architecture school. And then you've got the main studio windows to these spaces at first floor level and the skylights turning into the roof behind the power bit there. And you can see how that brings light all the way into the depth of the building there. So we came to completing the school with the second phase Macintosh decided to add another level of studios to the roof for the professors here. But there was a bit of a problem because at first floor opposite the museum here for thicker pen. The headmasters, the headmasters office. And it has its own decorative window above the entrance with a little circular light above and a staircase that sort of winds up on the east side, and this sort of forms if you look at the facades of the building, almost a little composition of a Scottish tower house that takes you up to a studio, which was the headmaster studio, and that block stretched across the depth of the building here. Now when, when the school was first constructed there was only one staircase in the middle which was a timber stair which was actually against the building codes in Glasgow at the time. When it opens they have to have firemen at the top and bottom, ironically with buckets of sand and water in case the school caught fire. But it meant when he, when Macintosh came to build the second phase, he added two stone staircases either end here and here that rise all the way up to the top of the building. And that's about the sequence of spaces on the roof. I just want to finish off today. So above the corridor here. There's another three bay windows you arrive at. And this is where we are on the left hand side and this is the lozier and it's, you feel like you're almost in the crypt of the church with the thermal mass of these bear brick arches. And that timbers actually laid on a concrete slab, the floors to the rest of the building steel and timber. This is quite enclosed except you, you look out the window and you're right up at the roof of the building looking out over the city the Clyde, the hills of Renfrewshire beyond. Not unlike, I think this is a bit speculative but this is Patrick Geddes' outlook tower in Edinburgh at the top of the Royal Mile. And the idea here was you start at the top of the building where there's a camera obscure, where you would study the city and its hinterland and you'd moved down through the building related to Geddes' valley section diagram to understand the relationship between the city and the country, Scotland and language kind of a euphemism for English and empire, and then the relationship between country and Europe and world. And putting together the study of geography, economics, sociology, architecture into one discipline, what Geddes calls geotechnics. And I think you get that same idea of the relationship between the building and the city in the art school, and of course Margaret Macintosh and Anna Geddes were great friends, in that conversation going on over dinner sometime, but you move through that space into this glass corridor called the Hen Run, and this is entirely an accident. Because the Headmaster's studio was built across the depth of the building here to make the connection between the new studios at roof level in the west, the building in the east wing, Macintosh had to cantilever this glass corridor out over the roof of the museum here. And you're totally exposed to the city, so moving between darkness and light and closure and exposure. And that's the key to understanding the school and its entirety, I think, the different internal spaces fine tuned with their different spheres for different activities. Somehow this way of thinking about the environment inside buildings has been lost today. With building management systems and smart technology you never notice the difference between time of day or season or weather. We talk about adaptive comfort theory, building physicists out there, people are not machines, we like to feel things, we like to feel cold, warm or hot, and we expect to feel different in different weather and in different seasons, and the stone building as opposed to a timber building, and I think Macintosh has really got an intuitive understanding of this. This is a more or a phrase from Dean Horne, he has what we what you might call an environmental imagination. So this is my final slide, a drawing of the windows of the school. A lot better than my doodle. And I think is what's interesting about this is it's enough to understand the building entirely. The Glasgow School of Art stands out to me for three reasons really. It represents the culmination of those arts and crafts environmental principles about the shaping of buildings to a particular place at particular climate. But paradoxically at the same time, the building as a machine allows an unprecedented level of control to be maintained over the environments with individual spaces within it, really foreshadowing buildings, the technology that we're used to and expect and buildings today, but perhaps most importantly and most significantly these different passive environmental strategies and the technology that makes it work are integrated architecturally with an unprecedented level of sophistication. So the provision of light, daylight or electric light at night is in a way also symbolic of the power of art and art education as well to transform 19th century Glasgow and certainly sort of dark and polluted world into a refined city of design and culture. Thank you. I'll stop there. Should I stop sharing my screen. Yes, please. Thank you. Thank you. And happy to take any questions. Yeah, thank you. I think I'm happy to sort of monitor the chat box and ask you questions I have so many questions of my own as well and it was just fantastic and fascinating to see the live drawing in process. Okay, I think this is the first time we've had that at a PMC event and I was speaking to myself, I think that requires incredible skills so yeah I'm very impressed. I hope it's okay it was a bit of a mess in the end. That was great. Yeah, thank you. So I have a lot of questions but looks like so do all the people who attended the talk so I think I'll start with some of the questions that we have in the chat, and then we can sort of see how much time we have and talk through some things as well. And I also just wanted to say before that that you we have a lot of sort of thank yous and an amazing talk comments in addition to questions. Thank you. So, a lot of the questions we have now are quite specific about the building. So I'm going to ask a few of them and then maybe you can take them. So, one question from Susan Johnson is, was the art school anywhere near to the present railway station, and then Nina Baker asks about boiler fuel, was it coal, if so, if so, where was the coal ashes stored. Barbara, how high asks about the state of the building in the moment. Barbara Smatlaniek would like to know about the quality and the source of the glass used in all the windows, which is a really great question. And actually Janet has a person has a great question about the window cleaning process. And if you could clarify, say something about that. Do you want me to go through all of them because they're quite interconnected in a sense. Shall I try and answer a few of those. So the school of art was, you know, it was facing North onto Bentry Street. So if you know sake hall streets in Glasgow. And the intersection with Buchanan Street where the, where the concert hall is if you had West, it's about 10 minutes walk or approaching the motorway but not quite as far as the motorway. What state is the building and at the moment is a sort of two weeks ago and there wasn't much to see. There's a lot of scaffolding is a real shame. It feels like the stone walls are still there and not much else. So there's a big discussion at the moment. There's a potential project to sort of reconstruct refurbished the building but I imagine it will take at least a decade for that to be complete. Question about coal and boiler fuel so the coal. The space between the pavement and the building is sometimes filled in with workshops, but to the west of the stair they had a space where they could bring the coal down and into the, into the boiler house there. So it could be stored kind of quite directly there. Window cleaning. So those, those window brackets that that sort of project out from the facade of the building you literally lay planks of woods across between those brackets, and then pitch your ladder on it and climb up a ladder and start wiping it used to be them. I think I'm fighting saying the most dangerous profession in Britain. Quite easily fall off and very connect. Wow. Do you want to keep going we have a few more related questions actually. And so Pamela cooly asks about windows. Since outside light was so important. What was the building used for at night, and also another question from Liz Davidson. Sorry. Yeah, given an unrivaled amount of when openable windows, how much did the occupants use them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I'm not sure. When after the first fire when we started looking at the reconstruction project we, we did a bit of research looking at the windows in more detail and the fascinating thing was across some of them we've double glazed. I mean, not as a, not as a, not as a double glazed unit that you would bring to the site but there was a layer of glazing on the outside and a piece of timber and another layer of glass on the inside. So I guess that Macintosh knew that these rooms would be too cold and winter and that's part of what the ventilation system seems to be about trying to warm them up but um, but yeah of course you could, you can open them in some way and sort of introduce cross ventilation across the, across the space and for me that's the, that's what's really profound about the building environmentally is, it's, it's so in tuned to people and the human scale and how you adapt yourself to the building both the technology, opening, closing drawers to let hot air and opening a window to let a breeze through but also providing you with opportunities to move between different spaces. If you wanted to be warm or if you wanted to be colder, closer to that sort of half of the spine wall or up onto the roof to look out over, over the view and there's something we forget that's sort of fundamental to environmental psychology, people are far happier when they, when they have the choice of the environment that they want to be in rather than in a space which is always 21 degrees, regardless of the season or the, or the weather. So why was the building used at night so there's an interesting tension between the role of the art school as perceived from London and by the government which is about teaching trades people and artisans, how to, how to make better products and naturally what the art schools themselves wanted to do which was to teach fine art. So there's plenty of plenty of well to do people, customers in the day who want to learn fine art who can benefit from these enormous windows but of course if you're, if you're Macintosh or if you're someone who is an apprentice to a trade, you have a job during the day so you, you have to have your classes at night and that's where the sort of need for artificial light comes in. Yeah, it's great. And we have a couple more questions actually right now I know that you can read them, but I'm going to read them out for the audience as well. So Barbara also has another question about the reconstruction and how the reconstruction of years to the original construction. So I think that's still up for sort of negotiation is quite controversial thinking about how authentically you sort of rebuild this building. And of course there's, there's, there's certain skills and certain crafts that you, you can reinvent, albeit the building has been modeled incredibly in three dimensions you know every every corner and every inch has been scanned so it would be possible to do that. But then whether that's appropriate or whether, whether there's opportunities to, to think about introducing things like insulation, if you are, if you are rebuilding it. And then yeah that was a big discussion about should the, should the windows be double glazed. I think the conclusion was that would be a good idea. That relates exactly to a man, Rashid's question about new services, like new lighting, lighting, etc. How do that sit with the original structure of the building. So when I was originally working in the building or doing research in the building before the fire, they'd recently installed new radiator electric ready radiative panels and the ceilings of all the main studio spaces. And connected it to a building management system like we would use today that said it should always be 21 degrees in this space and radiators would come on if it was too cold and if it was too hot. They were actually using some of the original ducts to ventilate the space, but always keeping it at 21 degrees. And what was fascinating was the people using those spaces were really uncomfortable and couldn't understand what was going on. The students I spoke to my head's really warm and I don't understand why this is a big stone 19th century building is February. Absolutely boiling. Why is this happening. The tension between an engineering solution to a problem that in a way has been invented because the fantastic thing about the building is actually people enjoy the environmental the atmospheric experience of it as much as the as much as the spaces themselves. Yeah, in fact we have two very good questions about the ventilation system. Christina asks about whether the ventilation system contributed to the spread of the fire. And also James Ashby asks about whether the ventilation system was meant to address any of the byproducts of the artistic techniques that were being used at the time since the dust humans papers and so on. Yeah, that's interesting. Certainly the development of these ventilation systems which you know was going on in other buildings hospitals and schools before the school of art in Glasgow. Albeit, I think the system in Glasgow is, is very inventive in its own way is slightly more sophisticated, but was in response to fumes for example, and suits that would spit out of gas lighting. So you often find gas engineers branching out into ventilation engineering to, to solve the problems they're creating through gas lighting but of course the school in Glasgow is lit with electricity. So yeah, there might have been an aspect of that which was about removing, you know, fumes from oil paint or, or, or sculpting. But my sense is it was mainly it was mainly for thermal Macintosh is interesting it was mainly a sort of thermal concern anyway this this correspondence with the building committee for the for the school where Macintosh is kind of horrified when someone just might only just put a radiator and so it says well radiators are really ugly, we can't ruin the building with radiators can't we just, can't we just rely on the system in the, in the wall. And there's, there's almost something beautifully simple about just having that spine down the middle of the building with all of the environmental systems in it which is a lot more, which is a lot simpler than similar installations and board schools for example we're often the, the, the inlet ducts are on the outside of the facades of the building. There's a beauty in the simplicity I think. We have one more specific question and I think we can branch out to two sort of broader questions. Denise Ferguson asks about skylights and the fact that we can't keep skylights from leaking now what special technique was used to make the mortar proof. I think they probably leaked. Yeah. It's probably a constant repair job. Good point. Thanks. So, I think Barnabas color has a question that actually segues beautifully into the question that I was going to ask as well so I'll ask them both together. Yeah, in a sense. So, some of the things that I was thinking I was thinking about when you were talking was about how concerned we are at the moment with ventilation and how badly or well ventilated houses are what, whether it's the sick building syndrome in workspaces or if we're thinking about also rising energy costs and insulation, as well as sort of mental health as well in terms of what you called environmental psychology, I think, in that we want to, we want to know what's happening outside we want to be able to control a little bit of, of how much of the weather we let in and things like that. That works really well with Barnabas color's question where he says implicit and some of what you say is a critique of present day building management. Other explicit lessons you'd like anyone involved in teaching practicing or managing architecture to take away. And so yeah so I think that really the very broad question is what can we learn from Macintosh and other things that we shouldn't learn from Macintosh as well. But that Macintosh is the cliche as he's a total designer right he designs from piece of cutlery to a chair to a building at all scales. And I think what's interesting about the art school is he's also designing environments, and that means thinking about how spaces feel with a deep empathy for the people who use them. How bright or dark they should be what direction the light comes from what it feels like and summer and winter. What temperature it is, whether you're aware of what the weather is doing outside, which is all deeply connected to, as you say, what we know called mental health and well being. And what we tend to do when we design buildings now is leave that to the services engineer and the services engineer leaves it to the software, and the software says it should be 21 or 22 degrees 500 locks. And you should never know what the weather is outside, or what the season is. You never want to be warmer or colder than that you should always just be wearing a T shirt, you should never put a jumper on, or, or adapt yourself to this to the environment that you're in, and treating people like machines. And I think there's a very valuable lesson in that for architects. And that we have to imagine, imagine the spaces that we're creating before we create them, and try and make them pleasant spaces to be in. I mean, there's maybe a more technical discussion about our obsession with tightness and insulation, which may or may not be so appropriate, considering a scenario in 2050 where the world is getting warmer and warmer. And secondly, if we were more willing to accept that people might be able to adapt or be comfortable in spaces that are colder than 21 degrees in January. Then, if you can broaden the range of conditions that people will, that people are happy and that people will accept. We can reduce the energy use by reducing the size of the cavity, less air conditioning and less heating. And sometimes the easiest solutions are the low tech solutions, but the trouble is nobody wants to sell you a low tech solution, because there's no money to be made. The horsehair screens sound fabulous, for instance. Yeah, thank you, and we have a couple more specific questions that have come in while we were discussing this but this is a really, we're going to have to wrap up but I do want to ask some of these questions because they're so spot on as well. Simon Barlow asks about what considerations are being presented for working towards or contributing towards net zero targets. In the art school or generally? I think in the art school. In the art school. I don't know. It's a shell at the moment. And I guess that's a question for the reconstruction. I mean one thing that's very easy to do now to retrofit onto a building that's designed like this of course is sort of heat recovery systems where you don't need to worry so much about heat leaking out into the into the atmosphere because you can just recover that energy and use it, use it for something else but from an historical perspective I think what's fascinating is leaving coal out of it which makes it much more complicated. The art school used electricity for two hours in the evening during winter and in 1899. I worked out it used about two and a half thousand kilowatt hours of electricity a year and the buildings about two and a half thousand square meters so that's one kilowatt hour. One kilowatt hour of electricity per square meter per year. Nowadays we build buildings that use about 200 kilowatt hours of electricity per square meter per year. And yes, that carbon performance is improving, but that's because we're decarbonizing the national grid. It's not because we're designing buildings to use any less energy. There's something that's going wrong in our approach to designing architecture and our dependence on technology, our reliance on electricity in particular that makes these questions really difficult I think and unless we can change that the only solution will be to try and address the problem at the scale of the grid of the country and the building but my takeaway is buildings that use less energy are generally more enjoyable to be in. Yeah, thank you. I think we're out of time and I think that your last answer was so sort of poignant in a way as well. I think that maybe we should wrap up. I have more questions as well as I'm sure other people do as well but I think that's just a way to say that we have to have you back for another talk. So thank you so much for your talk and for sharing ideas about sort of histories and futures as well with us. So, thank you. Thank you and thank you everyone for joining us and listening and much appreciated. Thank you everyone for joining us today and hope to see you at some of our other research lunches. Most of them will be online at the moment. So, see you virtually. Bye.