Can't help but think that a re-build will end up looking like a Disney theme park. The money would be better spent helping starving people in the world?
I have made a similar point over on TOP, but it takes a day or so for things to get vetted and posted; perhaps my divergent opinion will not be aired.
Regarding all of these things and their relevance, both culturally to the world and morally to everyone concerned, this event doesn't even begin to rate with 9/11 as disaster on every scale of human thought.
In the case of the Glasgow fires at the art school, my view would be to raze the place to the ground and create a brand new, contemporary design and probably from somebody who has had a hand in building modern Chicago as seen through the prism of one Slobodan Blagojevic.
Having lived in a city full of old, ugly buildings masquerading as art, oh! for a breath of fresh air. I tend to believe that unremitting physical bleakness can't but help impress itself upon the lives, minds and expectations of those exposed to it all their days.
My first studio was a large top-floor apartment in a part-commercial and part-residential building owned by my father-in-law; it was as ugly as sin and Charlie Dickens would have felt instantly at home, or at least, many of his characters would. The building was bought with an eye to future selling upon retirement, but it turned out to be
blighted, and I choose that word carefully, with a level of listing that even controlled the type of cleaning allowed to the external surface. An unmitigated fiscal disaster that meant the survival of one of the most unpleasant looking things it has been my lot to enter. There is a madness (and political power) at play in many of those types of "conservation" concepts that belies reality and even basic concepts of good aesthetics.
Everything has its time, then it's time for the new.
Rob