Glasgow School of Art: heart of British renaissance in visual creativity

Grace and poetry of fire-damaged building was often reflected in the work of Turner prize-winning students and teachers

In Alasdair Gray's classic modern Scottish novel Lanark, a student at Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s becomes obsessed with painting frescos for his melancholic, declining city.

Gray's partly autobiographical fiction brings the school to life, not just as one of the most beautiful buildings in Britain comparable with Gaudi's masterpieces in Barçelona but as a place of fervent, youthful idealism and intense, high-pressure creativity. In the 1990s and since, this very palpable creative atmosphere made GSA one of the centres of a renaissance in British visual creativity.

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