A MATTER OF NATIONAL TRUST

In conversation with Liz Davidson

Liz Davidson graduated from Edinburgh College of Art as a post graduate in Architectural Conservation. Since then Liz has held a number of senior posts including leading the Heritage Lottery funded Townscape Heritage programme to regenerate the Merchant City; as director of Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, a charitable property developer rescuing and bringing back to life numerous historic buildings and head of Heritage and Design at Glasgow City Council with an active statutory role in maintaining the highest standards of historic building repair and maintenance.

Liz was senior project manager on the Glasgow School of Art Regeneration project from 2014 through to 2022 and has more recently been involved with the Hill House Project

MACMAG spoke to Liz in April 2023 to discuss her work on the Mackintosh regeneration project and on the Hill House, working alongside Sarah MacKinnon on both projects. Sarah is currently Head of Conservation of Properties for the National Trust for Scotland.

MM: To begin with, could you tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you came to be involved with the Mackintosh restoration?

LD: Prior to my work on the Mackintosh Building, I had been the Director of the Building Preservation Trust in Glasgow and in 2014, when the fire occurred, I was Head of the Conservation Department and Head of City Design. Sarah was the Director of a different trust in the West of

Scotland so we both came from a building preservation trust background. Following the fire, Glasgow School of Art advertised for people to work on the restoration, repair and conservation of the building and I was appointed. I was lucky enough to get involved at the tail end of 2014 and my first job was to advertise for an assistant. Sarah came and was easily the best person to come on board. Very quickly there were two people whose background was coordinating building projects, pulling together all the briefs, procurement, with the skill set for running a building project. I must say the school was an absolutely fantastic place to work at that point. The Reid had opened in 2014. It had a great Estates Department that knew how to get exhibitions put up and move students around.

Working on the Mackintosh was the best privilege of both our lives, we would both say that no matter what job we have done previously or have gone on to do, the Mackintosh was something out of the ordinary as a project to work on, with fantastic consensus, support, energy, and creativity throughout all levels of the school. It was a real delight as a project, until sadly the 2018 fire and everything came to a juddering halt

MM: What led you into this field of work?

LD: I did History and English as my background, but I did a postgrad in Edinburgh in Architectural Conservation because my interest was in the hands-on aspect of history, rather than just teaching or reading about it. It was about the architecture, but also about the place. When I was at the Building Preservation Trust (BPT), we launched something called Doors Open Day. It was the first one in the

UK at that point and it is still running in Glasgow. It was all about engaging people in their neighbourhoods and in the quality of the built environment.

The BPT was very much about taking on buildings at risk, but only if you had a good reason to restore them and put them into use, in terms of the social capital of putting a building back into use in a community and society. It was that mixture of the fact that every city in Scotland, or town or countryside, has got extraordinary wealth from the past, both in terms of the embodied energy that you have got in existing buildings but also the craftsmanship and what they mean to a place. There was never a project that did not have somebody that felt really dear about a building or that meant a lot to a local community to have that building back in use. Bringing a building back into use has so much repercussion in terms of how people feel about a place, especially if you can get it into public and social usage as well. I think it is just an amazing profession to be in because you learn about a building, how it has been put together in the past and then you combine it with the fact that this country has amazing skills in terms of design and that there is more sustainable and ecological technology that is coming forward. That all coming together and fusing creates brilliant moments of drama in architecture and places, and that is what interests me the most. I can never be an architect but I do love historic buildings.

The Mackintosh is probably the best case I have ever come across. There was not a day in the four years, before that second fire, that Sarah and I would not have been walking in that building and spotted something we had not seen before. You just thought, oh, how clever was that to think about doing it like that. The way that the building, uniquely in my experience, used light; how cleverly it bounced light around and used light to create mood and atmosphere. It really did affect your soul. Which is why the second fire was such an extraordinary tragedy. I hope that is what the Mackintosh School of Architecture and School of Design still retains – it is that transformative power of great design from the past and how it inspires the future. It all came together for us in that place.

MM:That leads perfectly on to the next question, could you tell us a little bit about your specific role pre 2018 and what that would involve?

LD: My role title was Senior Project Manager, but I was really more a project director or co-ordinator, pulling together the other streams. Sarah came on to work with me as the project manager. She is, arguably, one of the best project managers in Scotland and she has now gone on to something much higher and much more important in the National Trust for Scotland, handling one and a half thousand buildings. My initial job was to write the brief for the restoration and in that triangle of any job, when you have got cost, quality and time, it was all about time. Get it back for the students as soon as you can. Quality was not really even in the triangle, that was non-negotiable. Quality had to be at the level that Mackintosh had built it, and more, because we wanted to do extra in terms of digital enabling and sustainability. Quality was not a factor, programme was, so I was on a fairly fast track to write the brief, get it through procurement, appoint the team and then assemble the contractor, put it out for tender and get the works underway. We were pretty well on target, which would have been Easter 2019 for a soft opening and then a full opening to the students in September 2019. But then the fire occurred in June 2018.

At that stage the work was pretty far advanced because we had been on site for the best part of three years. It was coming out of the ground looking absolutely extraordinary. What was really thrilling was the knowledge that the craftsmanship had not been lost. Sometimes it was just one or two guys, they might been plasterers, joiners or carpenters, but the work was absolutely extraordinary and as good as of its day. That was the really rewarding part, working with that level of craftsperson. The job was obviously the building and to get it going there was a bit of fundraising involved. We personally did not have huge amounts to do in terms of the main funding, which would have been from the insurance, but we were at all the meetings with the insurers, assuring them that this is how it was going to be done. Then there was a huge amount of public speaking and just making sure that people were engaged.

Something that we actually got criticised for at the time by the press, was the sheer amount of people that we took through the building, including students. We felt it was really important to make sure as many of the GSA students, in particular, saw the building. We did not want it to be something that you put the shutters up for four years and then opened it and had a ta-da moment. We wanted people to see the works in progress at all stages because the majority of the building after the 2014 fire was not damaged. The loss was about 17% of the building. The library was the main tragic loss and then a lot of it was smoke damage or water damage on the West side. But over 2/3 of the building really was not affected at all. So you could still take people in and talk about the building and just see the beauty of it.

We took one elderly married couple in their mid 90s, Tom and Audrey Gardner, wonderful Fine Arts students who had studied there before the Second World War, and had remained students during the war, and who had been on the roof of the building during the Clydebank Blitz, where their romance had possibly kindled. They came back and walked right way up to the top, which is a lot of staircases. After their visit they wrote in the visitor s book something like ‘We are glad we have seen the building and she is being healed’. I think most people who knew the Mackintosh before the fire and had studied there or been part of it, really felt it was a kind of living organism – it had soul. It is as if it were alive and had been badly hurt by the fire but it was being beautifully hospitalised and was coming out of it looking absolutely magnificent. The other joy that would have happened if it had got through to completion was that we were discovering so much. The building over the years had had masses of well meaning janitorial coats of paint and varnish. A lot of the building was very black and white before the first fire; all the woodwork was very, very dark, if not black. When you look back at the original photographs, early drawings or images of the building, all the wood was much lighter and you can always see the grain of the wood. We took down a moulded architrave that was damaged and we found the original colours of something that had been there previously. Mackintosh was a great believer in not hiding the material he used. The building would have come back in a much lighter form, through the woodwork in particular and the wood he used was just beautiful. It would have just been outstanding as a space to be in.

MM: You worked on the building both before and after the second fire – how did it differ the second time around?

LD: The fire in June 2018, was a massive trauma for everyone - the school and the local community were absolutely stunned and horrified because it affected everybody so badly. The first thing that we had to do as a team was, overnight, become not a building restoration team, but a school recommissioning team because for two and a half months all the buildings in the immediate vicinity were evacuated. The next thing we had to do was to make the building safe as quickly as possible to allow people into the streets around the area, hence the mass of scaffolding on the building which was the quickest way to stop the Council from saying ‘this is dangerous, we are going to demolish it’. This meant we did not have the luxury of doing something like we did with The Hill House where you have a very beautifully framed steel box over the building protecting it.

The engineers and the contractors had to come in and were immediately faced by the building control department, saying this is dangerous we are bringing it down if you cannot prove to us this is not going to fall into the street and destroy other properties. We had to use drone flights and cherry pickers and monitor the situation. Here, again, the school was very helpful. We had them on board from day one, taking point cloud imagery to compare with the point cloud imagery we already had, to show if there had been any movement and where it had occurred. We were able to take a scientific case back to the Council to say there have only been areas of movement in the library and in the northeast corner at top of Dalhousie Street and in those areas we are going to throw scaffolding on right now to stop any further movement. Eventually we had to go around the whole building and just prop it up and brace it from the inside. That took up all the next three or four months, and in the meantime, what we were doing was coordinating all the visits into The Reid and The Bourdon to ensure that we could get the building decontaminated because the smoke would have got into ventilation systems or water systems. We were managing a huge amount of decontamination work and safety checks. In The Reid the glass was cracked so we were having to monitor that and put safety barriers behind it, just so we could get the buildings back in use. The returning students had to do work off site for the first week and then we did get the students all back in by a hairs breath, pretty well, for the start of term. Having said that, you know it was a disruptive experience for any student to come back into, whatever stage they were at.

We were immediately no longer in charge of the project, the project stopped that night. The contractor KEIR could no longer do a job that was a restoration job, so the next thing we had to face was getting involved at every level, with dealing with the insurance, the fire service, the investigation. There were all the contractual legalistic issues that have to be dealt with to stop a contract that has still got a year to go. We had to work solidly alongside what was the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, painstakingly looking at the archaeological salvaging of what was in the building. The fire service wanted to do a forensic examination of the building to find out how the fire started and they never actually did find the root cause, but it took them three years to painstakingly sift through the building. Every time we moved into a corridor or into a studio, you first of all had to send the engineers in and the contractors in to say, is this safe? That was finished in June 2021. More or less every working moment was to do with making sure that we could keep the building safe and constantly try and put more strength back into it, while the school was running a business case for a feasibility study to look at what was the right thing to do on the site: Is it to keep the building? Is it to restore it? Luckily that was the end decision, so doing that painstaking work was correct because if the conclusion at the end had been to demolish it, then that would have been quite a lot of wasted effort in the way that it was gone about. At the moment the school is looking to start the process of appointing a team to look at the restoration again. That will be a long haul job, which is why in the summer of last year, I figured that it was the right time to leave the project – Sarah having left already - because it will be another length of time before the restoration building works can start properly.

MM: Could you give. us a bit of background on The Hill House Project, how you got involved and what your roles were?

Sarah left GSA around December 2021 and went to a big job in the National Trust. She is now Head of Conservation of Properties for the entirety of the National Trust for Scotland. I left in the summer of 2022. Sarah has oversight of all the buildings and their repair maintenance needs. The Hill House is a specific project. It has been in the trust ownership since 1982, and it is a phenomenal building. It is Mackintosh at his finest, a most mature, domestic work, comparable to Windy Hill which was an earlier work of his. What the client here was really saying to Mackintosh was we want an iconic Mackintosh building. We want you to design a building for us at one of the prime sites in Helensburgh, which in itself was a smart, Victorian Glaswegian suburb. The building was in one family's ownership, the Blackie’ s (as in the publishers) for something like 60 years, and then they passed it to a like-minded architect and their family. It would have been at a good price at the time because even then, there were known issues with the fabric of the building. They owned the building for another 20 years or so, and at that point it passed to the Royal Corporation of Architects, who looked after the property for the next 10 years.

In 1982 the National Trust for Scotland took it into their guardianship and have had it for just over 40 years now and I think there has not been a quinquennial survey that has not thrown up the issues that it has always had, which is to do with the Portland cement material that wraps around in the building.

The building was built between 1902 and 1904, about the same time that the second phase of the Mackintosh Building was getting built and the material that Mackintosh uses here, and the detailing is very similar to what he ended up using in the second-half of the Mackintosh Building. For Mackintosh one of his great stylistic drivers was the whole issue of the sculptural form of the building. He was a great innovator and very early adopter of modern technology, modern materials and the new developments that were coming forward, and Portland cement at the time was the absolute wonder material and it did do a lot of what it said on the tin. So the issue we have got with combining his stylistic forms at The Hill House and this wonder material was the fact that he, unlike other arts and crafts architects of the day, was one of the first to really do away with all the traditional detailing that you need on a building, particularly in the West of Scotland, to shed water. If you were in the South of France, this might be fine. You could have a flat roof and hardly any drip mouldings and overhangs and gutters, but we are in the West of Scotland and that has got worse rather than better with climate change.

So the issues we faced at The Hill House are that for decades that building has managed to let in moisture and water, trapped it into the stone substrate of the building, and because of the concrete it is not very easy to get the water to evaporate out and the water over the years has been tracking into the building to come out through the plasterwork and through Margaret McDonnell stencils, the painted finishes, the panelling and the plasterwork generally. It has had a history of just flaking paint and plaster and rot in some places and ceiling collapses. The moisture readings of the building over the last decade have been taken very scientifically, using all kinds of gizmos - thermography and microwave readings, and many other forms of scanning of the building to record just where the moisture is and it is still very much in the core of the building, in the chimneys and everywhere basically.

What Mackintosh did was do away with sills, with any drip mouldings, any hoods over the windows. When he had a Gable head, he did not put lead on it; he did not put stone on it - he just wrapped the material up and over so it went vertical, wrapped into the reveals of the windows, wrapped over the parapets, over the wall heads, over the chimney heads, and in all those areas that water may get in. When it is coming onto a flat surface, it is finding its way in. The Portland cement itself has developed shrinkage over the years. It has not had enough flexibility to avoid the kind of hairline cracking that you get and that of course has a wonderful effect - capillary action of taking water in very slowly, quite deep into the core of the building and then, moving around but not finding its way back out.

Our job at the Hill House is to find a material that will create this unifying effect that Mackintosh was seeking to do.

I think if you look at the survey work on the building, about 80% of the Portland cement has been at least changed over the last 120 years of its existence. People have systematically and regularly found areas too damp and they have taken it off. Different approaches have been used over the years. There is been waterproofing to stop water getting in but that has only served to trap water in rather than to stop it getting in. It has had treatments where it has actually taken off the render and put brick behind it instead of stone because the stone is quite porous. A lot of it is face bedded as well, which is a problem. The stone has lost compressive value because it has been put on end and not laid in the correct bedding strata for how it should work in a sandstone building and it has had other experimental things done to it, such as carbon rods behind the render to actually pin it back and then grouted and things like this to try and keep the render on. The big decision that has been taken over the last decade was to decide that it is not about material, it is about the design. That is a big relief for the trust to know that it has not got to work through something like the Venice Charter, which would say materiality is everything. It is not all about keeping that piece of wood or that piece of glass. We have now got beyond that philosophical debate and decided it is the appearance and it is the style and it is the modelling of the building that is important. It is all about Mackintosh's vision for the design not that particular piece of portland cement. We will have findings here at The Hill House that will have implications, hopefully beneficial, for the Mackintosh because it is exactly the same material, albeit on brick rather than stone, and we can share any findings with the school on that which we would really hope to do.

At the moment we have got a plan that looks at about four years work. Mackintosh has got 2 anniversaries in 2028, one is the 160th anniversary of his birth in June of 2028, and the other one, sadly, is the 100th anniversary of his death in December. We are going to hit 2028 as our date for the opening. If earlier that would be great. I do not really like long programmes because it only costs more and the building stands around getting damper. In 2019, Carmody Groarke, a London architect, erected the box over The Hill House. It is a fairly extraordinary structure, and at the time, probably drew a lot of criticism from some quarters, who felt that spending the 4 million or whatever it cost in the end, could have been used on the building, but I think it was, with hindsight, a great decision because it has dried out the building, so it has now got a relative humidity that is quite stable. It stands off the building by about 3 metres, 4 metres in some areas and it allows a natural ventilation, so there is no forcing of moisture. It is all naturally just airing and drying out. With COVID and everything running slow for the best part of two years the building has had time to recover. We would have hit more problems if we had fired in and there has been more research and the buildings is now sound. It has a protective big cloak over it, which means we can work within that box to do the restoration. This protective shield over the building can remain while we are doing the work on the building and opening it up. Unlike the poor old Mack, which is covered in scaffolding, although I think they are going to get a roof over the Mack which is great.

The Trust is good at getting visitors through and what has been wonderful about the project is over the last 10 years they have really gone to town in terms of the research about the building and the materials and the technology used. We have a massive foundation that will form the basis of the tender that will go out this year to a design team to come on board to take this on because the new design aspect of this is going to be that there will be a visitor centre. We want to make sure that it is a striking, stunning piece of architecture, of the same quality but of a modern design, as Mackintosh's vision for The Hill House. It will be a two headed project with the garden wrapping in as part of it. I am hoping we can move the project really fast because again, it is one of those buildings that is a real victim of climate change, particularly in that part of Scotland. How do you deal with water and how do you deal with an ecological solution that is net carbon as far as we can and a net zero carbon building in the longer term?

MM: Can we ask you a little bit about your team?. The projects that you work on must require specialist knowledge. What skills or experience do you look for when assembling your wider team?

LD: There is an incumbent team at the moment that has done the work to date which is LDN architects in Edinburgh and Narro who are the engineers. Narro are the engineers on the Mack so there is a link there immediately between both buildings, which is nice because they really know their Mackintosh structures and his idiosyncrasies. We would always look for architects or engineers that had a conservation accreditation through the RIBA, the RIAS or through consulting engineers institutes.

Narro are one of the few that have that. It is wonderful to have a really strong design ethos and it's important to be abreast of all the developments in technology, particularly in sustainability but we also are looking for a company that has that kind of youth coming through and that knowledge and that adventurousness and being right at the forefront and cutting edge of innovation. Having said that we also want to know that the architects know about traditional building and how older materials work and function and perform and the idiosyncrasies of how a building like this will have been put together. So they need to have both sides of that knowledge base really within the practice. That is what we are looking for. We do not want a practice that can only do conservation. They can happily re-render the building for us but that is not enough because we need to know that we can make it much more environmentally efficient and we are going to put this building back so how can we accommodate insulation? What about low VOC paint? Somebody that has a very strong ecological bent will be essential for any job in the trust and we would be looking for somebody who has a desire to utilise the latest technology in terms of energy saving measures and things like that, so that is important.

We will also be looking for a team that can handle the new visitor centre and have a really holistic approach to something that works. Some bids might come in with two halves.. You could have two architects, with one main architect for design and another architect for conservation. I think it would be wonderful for the scale of this building to think about a practice that had all of that in house and had the sensitivity to do a really brilliant job with really skilled craftspeople and know how to detail that instruction to those people, but also to come up with something that really reflects The Hill House but is a is a strikingly modern building because that is exactly what Mackintosh would do if he were still alive. He would not design in an older style, he would design in the style that he had grown into. We will be looking to find the best we can and we may have to go out of Scotland, in terms of the craftspeople we may need and that's a shame because, for instance, for paint analysis there are no companies now really up in Scotland. Most of it is South of the border. I am not being overly nationalistic about this, but it is just nice to know that there are people, in terms of the economy, who are setting up in Scotland and doing this work. I will obviously make it an open competition and we will see who comes through on it, but the practices we have had working on it so far have really done superb work on the research of the building and in their knowledge of it. We know we have got the depth of experience and ability in a Scottish sense, which is reassuring.