Former students of the Glasgow School of Art have been speaking of their devastation after a second fire in four years destroyed the historical building.

Around 150 firefighters attended after the blaze took hold of the building on Sauchiehall Street just before midnight on Friday.

Nearby buildings, including nightclubs, were evacuated, with smoke seen for miles.

Former students have been speaking to STV News about the school, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the impact studying there had on their lives.

Clare Galloway, a visionary artist and writer from High Corrie, Isle of Arran, graduated from the Fine Art school in Drawing & Painting 22 years ago.

Since graduating the 44-year-old has led a colourful career in several countries, using art as a means of accessing individual and collective healing and transformation.

She is now based in Naples, south Italy, where she recently won a prestigious award from an important cultural association.

Speaking of the Glasgow School of Art she said: "I attended the art school for my first degree: purpose-designed as a school for fine arts, and inimitable in its atmosphere and sense of profound creative learning over the past century.

"My experience of it was as a sacred place: despite the dramas that unfolded in my four years studying there: my husband left me in my second week of my first year, I took a year out in the middle but sneaked into all the classes and lectures (so had an extra year there) - me and my friend Gregory, after a couple of pints in the art school pub, cheekily jumping on the bus trip to Paris with a first year group, not thinking for a minute that we'd go unchallenged, being locked in our studio when Prince Charles was visiting the building because they thought we'd do something outrageous and embarrass the school and collectively petitioning the head of the fine art dept about our lack of tutoring and harassing him in the lecture theatre.

"A lot of my time at GSA was spent in super overwhelm - not just with moving to the big city from the island, but struggling internally with my divorce, pushing against the 'art world' hierarchy and the obscenities of patriarchal privilege in the school at the time, feeling totally out of place even though I'd dreamed this would be where I'd find like-minded creative eccentrics and would finally fit in, really hating the jargon and the conceptualism, the political correctness and the lack of spirit and truth in it all.

"But throughout these conflicts, this building, I never realised at the time, what a profound container it was.

"About 15 years after my graduation in 1996 I visited again, and walked the black halls, climbed the shadowy polished steps, and couldn't believe that I hadn't seen the incredible beauty and depth of the place, peeking into the library and being in awe, when as a teen I'd seen it through the filter of all the tensions I was holding in me.

"The first fire was terrible, though the resulting collective force, the love and the passion for recreating it, that equal-opposing power of potent human possibility, seemed to push out of our minds, that the layers of marks and splashes of paint over the century didn't seem lost.

"But this fire, when the remaking of the building was just about finished: the painstaking redesign, the keeping with the original details, the artists who contributed their art to raise funds, all the contributions and support, realising how precious this school had been, only to wake up this morning and hear that 'experts think that it might have to be pulled down'.

"Yes, I know that there are more important things in Scotland like hungry families, deepening poverty, political struggles that might undermine our future in powerfully destructive ways, but I don't value the building around 'architectural importance'- I value it as a container for what it held for the people who worked there and for its eccentricity and raw nature.

"It seemed like a park, a landscape that we lived in, rather than a building.

"Unlike many of Mackintosh's buildings, which have an air of wedding cake tightness, that you'd have to tiptoe around and polish ever surface you touched, the beauty of the Mack was in its rawness and its seeming randomness, its quirky organicky realness.

"Plus the fact that when I 'studied' there, we had a serious lack of tutoring or practical guidance - I genuinely considered it a self-study course (in my whole final year, I spoke to ONE tutor for less than 10 minutes).

"This 'being left to our own devices', in this building, the feral feeling of that, our being able to simply run free, existing alongside-but-separate-from all the snobbery, pretension and superficiality.

"This experience in the Mackintosh building was utterly, divinely, beautiful.

Professional make-up artist Lauren Barbour attended the Art School between 2003 and 2010.

She credits it for giving her the skills needed in her profession and nourishing her passion and talent from a young age.

The 25-year-old from Castlemilk in Glasgow said: "The GSA has been a part of my life since I was ten years old right up until adulthood.

"Attending courses during school holidays and private lessons every weekend for seven years, the GSA nourished my passion and talent for art from a young age.

"Learning from portrait drawing to fashion and textile making to photography to ceramics and pottery making.

"My years of learning at the GSA has carried onto my makeup career I believe this is due to learning painting techniques and the training and strengthening of my hands.

"I am devastated that this has happened to the college I have so many memories in this building and have made good friends that came to study from around the world.

"It is a very sad time for the city of Glasgow, the GSA is so historic and is renowned worldwide.

"It is very upsetting I was hoping that maybe one day I could show my own children the place I learned so much."