St. Peter's Seminary (Cardross)

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Main chapel at St Peter's Seminary

St. Peter's Seminary is a Grade-A listed building north of Cardross, Argyll and Bute, Scotland. Designed by the firm of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, it has been described by the international architecture conservation organisation DOCOMOMO as a modern "building of world significance"^[1]. Nonetheless it is abandoned, and in a ruinous state.

1 History
2 Images
3 Grid Reference
4 Bibliography

[edit] History

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.

Determinedly 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By the time it was completed in 1966, its function was already out of date.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 church attendance in Scotland was declining and the numbers entering the priesthood were dropping even faster. As a result, the building never reached its full capacity of 100 students. From the outset, the building was riddled with problems, including maintenance difficulties with such a unique structure and significant water ingress.

In 1980 the building closed as a seminary, subsequently becoming a drug rehabilitation centre. However similar maintenance problems remained and it was finally vacated by the end of the 1980s. In 1995 a fire so badly damaged Kilmahew House that it had to be demolished. The building is Category A listed by Historic Scotland and, in October 2005, was named as Scotland's greatest post-WWII building by the architecture magazine Prospect. ^[2]

Nonetheless, the building remains a ruin- shockingly so, according to the architecture writer Frank Arneil Walker: "nothing prepares one for the sight of the new grown prematurely old."^[3] Attempts to convert and reuse it, or even protect it from further damage, have come to nothing - hampered by the unique design of the building and its remote location. Plans have included building 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.

In June 2007 it was announced that the building was to be included in the World Monuments Fund's '100 Most Endangered Sites' list for 2008.^[4]

[edit] Images

As of July 2005

Main block, with terraces of rooms	Water in the main block	Windows below chapel, inspired by Ronchamp	Student room
External stair	Cantilevered teaching block	Private chapel	Processional ramp

[edit] Grid Reference

St Peter's Seminary in NS 352784

[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)