RISOTTO Studio

Before a young Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art, he was scribbling notes about sewerage and ironwork on plans for a lemonade factory. The 1897 building for the British & Foreign Aerated Water Company, founded by Ernst Schmidt, a German expatriate who made his fortune bottling fizzy drinks, later became home to Scottish Adhesives, then artists. Today RISOTTO Studio prints colorful risograph stationery at the Glue Factory on Farnell Street, a building with reported ties back to Scottish Adhesives, though its own listed construction date of 1891 doesn’t quite line up with the aerated water factory’s 1897 build, so the two may not be one and the same. Either way, industrial architecture in this corner of Glasgow seems to age like fine soda water.

The factory itself is better documented than its current tenant. Mackintosh, then a junior draughtsman at Honeyman & Keppie, wrote notes on the drawings approved by Glasgow’s Dean of Guild Court in March 1897, covering ironwork and sewerage, proof he had a hand in the project. When the finished building went up for sale in 1903, though, it was credited entirely to his senior partner, John Keppie. One early student of Mackintosh’s work later claimed he’d designed “two fireplaces” there, which is either a footnote or the entire extent of his contribution, nobody has been able to say for certain.