Date: 22 June 07
Author: Johnny Rodger
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St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, a building completed in 1966 by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia architects was recently placed on the World Monuments Fund list of the World’s Most Endangered Sites for 2008. According to the WMF website that list contains buildings and monuments which are ‘casualties of neglect, conflict, natural disaster and pressures of change’. And the task of WMF is, again, that it ‘safeguards the world’s irreplaceable heritage’.
There’s no doubt that St Peter’s is a ‘casualty of neglect’ and also a victim of ‘pressures of change’. By 1980 the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland had given up on its mission to train young priests there. Some seven years later the attempt to use St Peter’s as a drugs rehab unit was similarly renounced: the buildings were abandoned and have lain derelict ever since. Despite various plans and initiatives - to convert it to housing, a hotel, a music centre etc. - over the years St Peter’s has rotted. Nearly all the fine joinery work and interior fittings have been ripped out; there have been numerous fires inside, and what remains is more or less a concrete shell.
But what a magnificent shell, some would say. And so they might, for the vision of this building as a work of monumental beauty is a major key to the understanding of the motivation behind the campaign to ‘save’ it.
In a purely functional sense however, the constituent parts these buildings housed were a chapel and a refectory with three floors of student accommodation above, and an adjoining education building with teaching and recreational rooms and a library. It is interesting therefore, to consider to what end these buildings, which had a very specific original function, should be saved. For the Church, it should be noted, have hardly been proactive in any campaign to ‘safeguard’ this ‘irreplaceable heritage’. Indeed, it would be fairly accurate, I think, to describe most of the people keen on ‘saving’ St Peter’s, the former seminary for training priests, as being secular types, principally architectural professionals or enthusiasts.
The truth is that the whole debate over the future of this Church relic, St Peter’s of Cardross, does in fact create a new role of itself for the building. That role is a social one, as a shibboleth, or a monumental key to the understanding of the tensions at work in society today. For through these discussions the building embodies those tensions and becomes itself ‘The House of Ironies and Paradoxes’.
The paradoxes and ironies are manifold. Let me elaborate very briefly on just a few of the most glaringly obvious: This piece of modern cutting edge architecture was commissioned by a client whose institution constitutes in itself Europe’s most conservative and reactionary tradition. … In a recent poll to find Scotland’s best modern building, St Peter’s, already a ruin, came top. … Not only that but this modern building was already obsolete before it was completed in 1966, as earlier in that decade the Second Vatican Council had decided that ‘active participation’ was the religious keynote for the era, and priests should accordingly no longer be sequestered in country retreats for their training… By wrapping their new build tightly around the 19th century Burnet country house, Kilmahew, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia architects were able to create an urban realm in miniature in the middle of the Cardross forest. Since Kilmahew house was demolished in 1995 however, this one modern half of a diminutive city with no historic centre and no heart, has been stranded in the wilderness.
We could continue with the St Peter’s Litany of Paradoxes ad infinitum...but the pattern is clear. What makes the monumental forms of this now ruined building a great - and living - work of art within the humane and humanist tradition inherited from the Judaeo-Christian history of Europe is that it exposes, expresses, and thus allows us to live with, the irresolvable tensions at the heart of our culture: namely, beauty or utility: visible or hidden: rural or urban: modern or traditional: accessibility or sequestration: individual or collective: alive or dead…?
Does it need saving? Or does it save us?
Johnny Rodger is editor of the forthcoming monograph Gillespie, Kidd & Coia: Architecture 1956-87 which will be published in November 2007 by Rutland Press.
St Peter's Confession
St Peter's Elevation
St Peter's Annexe
Images: Andrew Lee
Lighthouse Exhibition
Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, Architecture 1956 - 1987
In June 2006 The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to work in partnership with Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) to create a unique and ambitious programme of activity celebrating the work of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia.
