Gillespie, Kidd & Coia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were a Scottish architectural firm famous for their application of modernism in churches and universities, as well as at St Peter's Seminary in Cardross. Though founded in 1927, it is for their work in the post-war period that they are best known. The firm was wound up in 1987.
Contents |
[edit] Churches
The firm was already designing churches with a modern influence in the 1930s. with St. Patrick's, Orangefield, Greenock forming an example from 1934-35.[1]
The huge post-war construction project of new towns in Scotland relocated many people from inner city Glasgow. As a result, the number of Catholics in Glasgow collapsed: the total number of Catholics in eight city centre parishes fell from 69,000 in 1951 to 13,000 in 1971. This was against a rising number of Catholics in the country as a whole, reaching a peak of 15% of the population in the early 1960s. The changing demographics clearly required new provision of churches. Gillespie Kidd & Coia were nearly the only practice involved in the building of the new, radical churches.
St Mary's of Bo'ness 1962; St Joseph's, Faifley, 1964; Our Lady of Good Cousel, Dennistoun, 1965; St Benedict's, Drumchapel, 1965 and St. Paul's RC of Glenrothes, 1965 were all geometric buildings with sweeping roofs, which used new construction techniques, such as glued laminated timber. In contrast, churches including St Charles, North Kelvinside, 1959; St Mary of the Angels, Falkirk, 1960; St Bride's, East Kilbride, 1963, St Patricks, Kilsyth, 1963; and Sacred Heart, Cumbernauld, 1964 were all rectangular, load-bearing brick (in the case of St Charles', exposed concrete frame with brick curtain-walling) which were very plain on the outside, but dramatically lit on the inside.
[edit] St Peter's Seminary
Following a fire in 1946 at St Peter's Seminary in the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, a new home was needed for the seminary. Discussions began with Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1953, but the plans for a new college in the village of Cardross were not finalised until 1961, when building began. The plan was for a new building built at Kilmahew House, which had been being used as a temporary home. The 1865 house would become professorial accommodation, and around it would wrap a main block, a convent block, a sanctuary block and a classroom block.
Determindly modernist, brutalist and owing a huge debt to Le Corbusier, the building is often considered one of the most important modernist buildings in Scotland. "The architecture of Le Corbusier translated well into Scotland in the 1960s. Although the climate of the south of France and west of Scotland could hardly be more different, Corbu's roughcast concrete style, could, in the right hands, be seen as a natural successor or complement to traditional Scottish tower houses with their rugged forms and tough materials" wrote Jonathan Glancey. Filmmaker Murray Grigor made a documentary about the building entitled "Space and Light", while Glasgow artist Toby Paterson has painted it.
By the time it was completed, in 1966, it was already out of date. The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church decided that priests should be trained in communities, rather than remote seminaries. Meanwhile the number of Catholics in Scotland was declining and the numbers entering the priesthood were dropping even faster. The building never reached its full capacity of 100 students. In 1980 the seminary was closed, subsequently becoming a drug rehabilitation centre, and by the late 1980s, left empty. In 1995 a fire so badly damaged Kilmahew House that it had to be demolished. The building is Grade A listed by Historic Scotland and, in October 2005, was named as Scotland's greatest post-WWII building by the architecture magazine Prospect.
Nonetheless, as of 2005 the building is a ruin, and attempts to convert and reuse it, or even protect it from further damage, have come to nothing. There are plans afoot to build a 28-unit housing development in the building's grounds, and to stabilise the structure by stripping it back to its concrete skeleton, possibly fully restoring a small cross-section. This is a source of concern for conservation bodies including the Twentieth Century Society, who have placed it on their Risky Buildings Register arguing that this would destroy much of the remaining fabric of the building.
[edit] Images
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[edit] Grid Reference
- St Peter's Seminary in NS 352784
[edit] University architecture
Having completed St Peter's, the firm gradually had fewer and fewer commissions in Scotland, and became more involved with university architecture in England. From 1971 to 1979 they worked on two extensions to Wadham College in Oxford. These included one large block containing new postgraduate accommodation and a college library and a smaller addition behind the King's Arms pub, including a small music shop for Blackwells, described as "a refreshing, shocking contribution to the gloomy Oxford backstreet in which it stands" by the Architects Journal.
Robinson College at the University of Cambridge was their most important building of this phase, and the last major building they designed. Winning a competition in 1974 for the entirely new college, their design is almost exclusively of brick, and incorporated existing gardens dating from the 1890s and 1900s.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Listed Buildings - Greenock - St. Patrick's R.C. Church and Presbytery
[edit] Bibliography
- Cardross Seminary : Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the architecture of postwar Catholicism, (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1997)
[edit] External links
- Gillespie, Kidd & Coia at c20society.org.uk
- Gillespie, Kidd & Coia at glasgowarchitecture.co.uk
- St.Peter's Seminary at c20society.org.uk
- St.Peter's Seminary at riskybuildings.org.uk
- Temple to ruined dreams at The Scotsman
