Archive

The Gillespie, Kidd & Coia Archive

The Glasgow School of Art is one of Europe’s leading independent art schools with a strong tradition in architectural education. The School has had a long association with the firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia most notably through Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, principal partners in the firm and responsible for the creative direction of the post war practice. MacMillan and Metzstein both studied and later taught in the Mackintosh School of Architecture with MacMillan becoming Professor of Architecture in 1973; in addition, a succession of former GKC staff took up academic positions creating a strong link between the practice and education. It is largely thanks to these staff who realised the importance of the material for current and future generations of researchers that the archive has remained intact.

The Gillespie, Kidd & Coia Archive was moved to The Glasgow School of Art on the closure of the practice in 1987 and was gifted to the School by MacMillan and Metzstein in 2001. It is rare for records to survive the closure of an architectural practice and the breadth and depth of the archive allows comparison with that of Sir Basil Spence held in the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland in Edinburgh and Erno Goldfinger held in the Royal Institute of British Architects in London.

The archive is thus the primary source of material for the book, the exhibition, website and educational outreach programmes of the GKC Project.The archive is extremely comprehensive and contains over 18,000 items including drawings, job files, correspondence, photographs, glass plate negatives, sketchbooks and personalia covering the period from c1950 to 1987 when the practice dissolved. Inaccessible for the last two decades, the archive is now being catalogued and conserved, opening up this important resource to researchers and the public alike for the first time.

Currently housed in the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the archive will move into the new purpose-built facilities of the Mackintosh Research Centre for Archives and Collections in 2008 thus ensuring its long term preservation and accessibility.

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Contact details

The Glasgow School of Art’s archive collections, including the Gillespie, Kidd and Coia archive, are open by appointment. For further information please contact the Archivist at:

The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew Street
Glasgow
United Kingdom
G3 6RQ

T: +44(0)141 353 4592
E: archives@gsa.ac.uk