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Originally designed by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the Glasgow Herald, The Lighthouse in Glasgow, Scotland now houses Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City. Here, ginkgo leaves become words in the four-story glass screen designed by artist Alexander Beleschenko:
In Rennie Mackintosh’s first public building Alex Beleschenko’s glass panel repeats the words of a speech delivered by Mackintosh over a century ago. Beleschenko inserts another surface of Mackintosh into the building, another facet of his vision. It is a coded and hidden dimension: a text written for a voice translated into image. Mackintosh’s words are changed, a leaf for a letter, into a screen of unfurling and rotating gingko leaves. It is a contemporary manifestation of the art nouveau preoccupations with embellished typography and the interlacing of the architectural and the organic. Taken from a facsimile of Mackintosh’s notes, the transcription reiterates all the ellipses, odd words and misspellings of the original: here a stem at a 45 degree angle ought to be at 5 degrees; there a leaf turned through ninety degrees is missing. The prehistoric gingko is an apt tree for a puzzle: it uniquely occupies its own personal species, being neither properly deciduous nor coniferous. [text by Shirley MacWilliam]