It used to be said that St. Peter’s Seminary, near Cardross, is “where modernism crawled up a hill to die.” An ungenerous view perhaps, but this iconic structure, once voted Scotland’s best modern building by the architecture magazine Prospect, has been reduced to little more than a skeleton.
But the news announced last week of a major grant award from the Heritage Lottery Fund to the arts organisation NVA may signal new life in the nation’s most notable twentieth century ruin, and the landscape surrounding it.
There have already been small but significant signs of busyness worthy of report. Operating as ‘the Invisible College’, NVA have joined ranks with academics from Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, to run public and community events on the site over the past two years.
St. Peter’s is hard to ignore, once located.
Only 20 miles from Glasgow, but hidden away on slopes rising above the Firth of Clyde, it’s as if a spaceship has crashed-landed in a temperate rainforest. To the less discerning eye, it looks not unlike an NCP car park that has been badly led astray. First-time visitors and veteran returnees just stand and gawp.
St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, designed by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein. It opened in 1966 and is now a ruin. Photograph: Riba Library
St. Peter’s was once a glorious God-box, the inspired work of young Glasgow architects Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of the Glasgow firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, in which Catholic ritual was performed in a kaleidoscope of space and light. The seminary was never short of detractors during its short life of service. It was consecrated in 1966, and closed in 1980. Ever since, it has suffered at the hand of legions of uninvited defilers and despoilers.
Dereliction is something that happens slowly, but here the process has been hurried along by the work of arsonists and vandals.
Exposed beams overhanging the sanctuary and its altar-place carry telltale scorch-marks. Asset-strippers and trophy-hunters have long since removed every interior design feature that wasn’t too heavy to lift off the premises. Decorative woodwork was the first to go, all the way from window frames to Christian crosses.
In their place have appeared sprawling open-air exhibitions of graffiti. Some pieces, very good. Others not so much. There would be easily enough to emblazon the full length of a New York City subway train. And in the undercrofts, lurk displays of aerosol-can art of an altogether darker hue.
Of all the scrawled and stenciled messages, one encapsulates the popular desire for closure: rot in peace.
For a brief spell in the boom years, St. Peter’s was considered as prime real estate. Not any longer. Today, the seminary is in such disrepair that a project of full restoration is financially, if not practically, impossible. Maligned and raddled it may be, but in spite of everything, the place still has its guardian angels.
The radical idea behind the NVA plan is to reconcile reinvention with ruination. The Heritage Lottery Fund likes the sound of that. Their ‘first-round pass’ provides £565,000 for project development, leading to a second stage submission for an additional £3 million grant in 2015 enabling major capital works.
If realized, NVA’s plans would consolidate the building’s raw concrete and steel frame. While reinventing the chapel as an enclosed, wind and watertight events space, including restoring the ziggurat roof-light, one of the signature elements in the original design.
But the site is more than just its modernist centerpiece, and the ambitious plan extends to managing the 45 hectares of semi-ancient woodland that surround the seminary, much of it dating from the nineteenth-century project of formal landscaping undertaken by Kilmahew Estate.
Exotic trees would be given breathing space, rhododendrons tamed, viewpoints rediscovered, overgrown pathways put under foot, and historic bridges repaired. In the sheltered surrounds of the old Walled Garden, a new pavilion building is to be designed, serving as the creative crucible for public visits, artists’ residences and educational activities.
Participation will be key. The garden will be opened to the local communities of Cardross and Renton, and returned to levels of productive use not known since its Victorian heyday.
All this improvised repair work makes St. Peter’s a place suited for our times.
Barbara Kingsolver, novelist and nature writer, has argued that one of humanity’s great challenges in the 21st century will be learning to live with broken country. We’re not short of such terrain here in Scotland, a nation which still sees itself as the cradle of wild nature.
The reinvention of St. Peter’s, and the activities of the Invisible College, suggests a different model: an attitude to our landscape and built heritage that is respectful, but one ready to care by accepting that places are always on the way to becoming something else.
To acknowledge that adaptation trumps preservation, opens up very different prospects on a motley assortment of heritage landscapes that are botched or blighted, compromised or contaminated, beleaguered or buggered.
If current scientific predictions for global climate change prove even half-accurate, then the very idea of ‘jewel-box environments’ might soon be a thing of the past. We need to learn to live in a world after nature (where purity of original form is no longer what we crave).
So here’s the rub. We need places where new kinds of stories can begin. Places that work because they are worked, creatively, socially and experimentally. Where stuff gets grown, harvested and eaten. Where bright ideas sprout from collaborative action. Where opposites are entertained.
The example of St. Peter’s could prove eminently exportable to other broken places the world over. It might even allow for unexpected kinds of solidarity between communities that recognise in each other’s losses and contingencies, a version of their own.
Now that would be a brave new modernism.
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