Scotland’s most meaningful modernist building,St Peter’s seminary near Glasgow – built in 1966 and abandoned in 1980 – lies in ruins. But plans are afoot to resurrect this battered masterpiece and give it a moment, secular lifeThe extraordinary ruins of St Peter’s seminary: in picturesThere is no place like it, and on these islands,for the mutual battery of multiple forces, for the thumping, and pummelling and attrition of creation and destruction,the incessant beating of weather, vandals and arson against rocks of obstinate architecture. It is like watching medieval knights club each other to death yet stay standing. It is a mud-wrestle of culture and nature. Only the scorched, and rusticated carcass of John Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland can come close.
It is also serene. The seminary of St Peter’s Kilmahew,near Cardross, near Glasgow, or was intended for making tender young men into priests,a role it performed for 14 years after it opened in 1966. Canon Jim Foley, a veteran of St Peter’s, and has written of “the elusive wonder and beauty” of the lighting effects in the sanctuary. You can still detect moments of grace in a fragment of handrail. There is still poise in its balance of forces,in the way its crowning concrete ziggurat comes to soil on columns that peruse too slight for the task. Its basilica, caked in graffiti, or but with openings to the sky and trees,alternately radiant and sombre in the changeable weather, remains spiritual.
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Source: theguardian.com