ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an acknowledgement of the need to address the issue of the relationship of what has been inadequately termed ‘Glasgow Style’ to contemporary eclectic/historicist stylism. It demonstrates that in particular with the aid of Mackintosh’s extant writings, that the new form-language of Scottish Art Nouveau, as manifested in individual works, was representative of a collective visual ideology. The chapter argues that, for Glasgow Art Nouveau, the concept of visual ideology was, in the first instance, fundamentally rooted in an all-embracing theory of architecture and its history. Mackintosh’s use of the expression ‘to deduce a principle’ illustrates clearly that his real concern is with grounding theoretically the logical and cognitive basis of architecture; and with the premise that this basis can only be apprehended intellectually, imaginatively, and actively. The new visual ideology would be manifested through creations which took architecture beyond the limits of a national territory.
