Architecture, Its Histories, and Their Audiences

Abstract

In July 1897, The Studio , a British journal devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement, published the first part of an article titled “Some Glasgow Designers and Their Work.”1 It introduced readers to the work of Frances Macdonald, her sister Margaret, and the man Margaret would marry in 1900, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The article's author, Gleeson White, former editor of The Studio , turned his attention to Mackintosh only after discussing and illustrating the work of the sisters. The journal continued to showcase the group's members, bringing them to the attention of figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Otto Wagner in Vienna, and Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in Darmstadt. The impact of this exposure on the Macdonalds and Mackintosh is a story that is well known.2 Celebrated architects and their patrons were not the only audience for the articles in The Studio highlighting the designers’ work in the Glasgow tearooms. Catherine Cranston, who commissioned most of the work by Margaret Macdonald and Mackintosh that appeared in the journal's pages, was undoubtedly pleased to see it accorded such attention. But, in a period when architecturally driven tourism was not yet part of any business plan, Cranston was primarily concerned with attracting Glaswegians to her tearooms to have a cup of tea, accompanied by maybe a bowl of soup or a slice of cake. As her native city's most successful businesswoman across the course of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Cranston was not as interested in the international design press as she was in making money in ways that nonetheless served her fellow Glaswegians (she bequeathed her considerable fortune to care for Glasgow's poor).3 To understand the impact of the Macdonalds’ and Mackintosh's …