Lighthouse Gates

Glasgow

The Lighthouse is Scotland's national museum of architecture & design, and this artwork forms the entrance gates. These three panels are made of a galvanized steel framework of flat bar and profile cut steel pictograms, representing a portrait of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, wife of the building's original architect, the reknowned Glaswegian Art Nouveau architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

It is inspired by the "pixellated" super-real portraits of American painter Chuck Close. When the Museum is closed, and the panels are apart, the panels are seen as elegant abstract frames. However when the Museum is open and the panels are positioned one over the other, the portrait is revealed.

It is one of an ongoing line of commissions in the realm of bespoke architectural detailing. Others include highly decorative panels such as the fencing at Surfers Paradise on Queensland's Gold Coast, the grand staircase of the Malmaison hotel in Glasgow, the balustrading at Lochranza whisky distillery on the Isle of Arran, over three hundred metres of pedestrian balustrading in Glasgow's city centre, and the entrance to Tollcross Park in Glasgow's East End.