Down to the Smallest Detail

‘To come to the work of some of our present day architects and designers is like an escape into the mountain air from the stagnant vapours of our morass.”

When Charles Rennie Mackintosh wrote these words in 1902, he stood confidently poised at the edge of a new world. Architecture was discovering a new language for a modern age. Mackintosh was one of its early visionaries, a creative genius who discarded the past, only later to be discarded himself. He died penniless and ridiculed, an exile from his native Glasgow, Scotland, a suspected foreign spy.

But in our current globalized age, Mackintosh’s work suddenly seems more striking for its deep reliance on the tools of a dead era. If Mackintosh itched for the coming Machine Age, he was just as bound to a romantic notion about Glasgow’s stone castles and local Arts and Crafts sensibility. It is these tensions--between brave new world and mystical past, between masculine and feminine imagery--that give his work its almost claustrophobic power.

The current show “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art replicates his small, obsessive world. Visitors can both study Mackintosh’s drawings and look into life-size installations of his architectural work. Two rooms--including the Ladies’ Luncheon Room designed in 1900 for Kate Cranston’s Ingram Street tearooms in Glasgow--have been partially reconstructed. Unlike an earlier version of the show, seen last winter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the LACMA installation, curated by Leslie Greene Bowman, compresses his design work and the collaborations he made with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, on one floor, into a series of more intimate galleries. The idea is to envelop you into the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total vision that includes both the architecture and the design of even the most minute accessory.

Mackintosh’s relentless vision was deeply bound to his personal life. In the 1890s, he worked with a tightknit clan of Glasgow designers that included Macdonald, her sister Frances and Frances’ husband, Herbert McNair. Later, Mackintosh and Macdonald spun off to collaborate on projects of their own, both architectural and artistic. A large portion of the work here is by Macdonald: tearoom panels, decorative inlays in the furniture, posters and tapestries. As with many couples, who did what is sometimes unclear, but the collaboration was remarkably productive--almost all of the work included in the exhibition was produced during one decade.

Two projects stand out as masterworks: the 1900 Ladies’ Luncheon Room and the Glasgow School of Art, the latter built in two phases, between 1897 and 1909. The Ladies’ Luncheon Room best shows the work at its most fantastically obsessive; everything is part of a complex game. Chairs and tables are arranged to extend the rigid geometry into the room. Hanging light fixtures and long vertical chair backs echo wide vertical stripes on the walls. Umbrella stands mimic the vertical thrust of the chairs. The room evokes Victorian women buttering crumpets. It is an architecture that straightens backs.

But don’t be taken in by the stiff-backed chairs. Underneath the rigid geometry is a mild eroticism. Notice the soft pink detailing and the sensual curves that decorate the walls. The strong vertical thrusts of the columns and the rigid grids of the design are only the framework for a more sensual landscape. Above, the sinuous lines of two murals--one by Mackintosh, the other by Macdonald--hover like seductive apparitions. Everything is bathed in white to reinforce the dreamlike unity of the room. Or look closely at the Hill House bedroom: a Sleeping Beauty fantasy, with tightly closed petals tangled in a faint pattern of crisscrossing lines, a briar cage around the sleeping virgin.

In later work, these tensions are stripped bare. Mackintosh’s design for the Glasgow School of Art--the building that established him in the minds of some as an early Modern master--can be read as both the beginnings of a more industrial aesthetic and a subtle reworking of more traditional Scottish architectural themes. The forms here are stark. The facade has almost an industrial order, with large vertical casement windows set in a rough stone frame. But compare the building’s eastern and western facades, the former designed in 1897, the later completed in 1909. On the new facade, the vaguely castle-like tower is gone. Instead, the steel-framed bays are more aggressively abstract. Behind the facade, the library’s interlocking “split” beams, lattice rails and gridded casement windows all become part of an elaborate composition of right angles.

One of the show’s only disappointments is that a video provides the only view into the building itself, illustrating the limits of any architectural show. You can’t understand a building you haven’t seen, and viewed this way, these spaces seem as remote in distance as in time.

In that sense, the show can be read as a fable--the story of the architect’s private labors--more than a truthful look at architecture. By the time you reach the show’s final installation, the results of that labor become more haphazard. At Derngate, a house in Northampton, England, that Mackintosh designed between 1916 and 1919, the so-called feminine imagery is finally gone. In an echo of the Vienna Secession style that Mackintosh had long been in contact with, austerity takes over here. Right angles and black paint--with rows of sharp yellow triangular patterns--create a wonderfully complete order. Geometry finally reigns.

But by then Mackintosh and Macdonald had fled Glasgow for London, in part because of local indifference to work that was quickly considered dated, in part because of suspicions of his political leanings due to correspondence he had had with well-known Viennese architects. As the show demonstrates, Mackintosh’s legacy remains rooted in Glasgow, and by 1909 his most productive years were over, his oft-mean-spirited moods sedated with Scotch and, eventually, therapeutic painting trips to Southern France.

Of course, Mackintosh’s ability to meld 19th century Arts and Crafts style and 20th century industry seems almost prehistoric to today’s architect. So does architecture’s former faith in the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total work. After the perceived public failure of early Modernism, architects are reluctant to discuss the “vision” thing, even with willing clients. Nor are they willing to live the cult-like life of turn-of-the-century bohemian artist. And if architects still toy with extreme formal exercises, rarely do they achieve this degree of formal cohesion.

Perhaps the most striking lesson in the LACMA show from the point of view of the contemporary architect is in the role that Margaret Macdonald played in Mackintosh’s life. Any woman architect today will cringe at Macdonald’s sidekick status, mainly because it is so familiar. Nearly a century later, husband-wife partnerships continue to be the model for women in the architectural profession: life, work, architecture all tangled together. If the contemporary designing couple seems to live in a more balanced utopian dream, where children are raised under drafting tables while Mom and Dad sketch side by side, it is still a fact that few women have ever built successful architectural practices on their own. The exceptions--most notably the London-based Zaha Hadid--have had to contend with the still common, sexist expectation that even women who can design probably won’t know how to make a building stand up.

Mackintosh, of course, was the builder here. But it will never be clear exactly who did what in his work, nor who inspired whom. Nonetheless, when you enter the couple’s intimate world, such distinctions are no longer meaningful. What makes the show impressive is that it is able to convey how engulfing their world can be. To get the full effect of the era, museum-goers should jump in the car and take off for the Gamble House in Pasadena. There, the same Arts and Crafts obsessions can be seen but with a Southern California bent. Rather than the internalized world of Glasgow’s chilly haute-bourgeois climate, Greene and Greene’s suburban palace is a fantasy about health and nature. And one crucial difference--the Greenes were brothers, so they got equal billing.

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* “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Through Oct. 13. Adults, $6; senior citizens and students, $4; ages 6-17, $1; under 5, free. Also: free the second Tuesday of each month. (213) 857-6000.