Site specifics
The short documentary film Space and Light portrays St Peter’s Seminary soon after its opening in 1968 as a centre for modern Catholic education. Director Murray Grigor uses the buildings’ open sight lines and the rare Scottish sunlight to depict students filing out of dormitory rooms, funnelling into staircases, and congregating over food, study, singing, and ping-pong; their movement is represented as a graceful flow within the built environment. Student numbers were under capacity during the filming of Space and Light and continued to diminish. Running against the Catholic Church’s focus on cultural integration in the 1960s, St Peter’s fortress-like image was precisely what the Church was trying to shed. Once completed, this ambitious and idiosyncratic architectural project required significant labour and monetary resources for upkeep. Such steep demands combined with low enrolment resulted in its closure in 1980.
While the materials and design choices for the seminary challenged maintenance efforts, they contribute to its appeal as an architectural ruin. The lasting power of concrete has resulted in a grey structure surrounded by the rubble of other materials and invasive vegetation. In Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay observes that ‘new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless. […] It will not be for long. Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside of them.’[1] St Peter's deciduous setting is conducive to rapid incursion of organic growth, the predicted rose-bay and a variety of moss and fungi occupy the man-made geometries.
Evidence of a human congregation of squatters and ravers is also apparent. Sleeping bags, mattresses, clothing, food packaging, and general detritus abound. The seminary’s use as a drug rehabilitation facility in the early 1980s may have alerted a related demographic to its otherwise obscure location. During a visit in late 2012, ‘PLEASURE SCENE’ was spelled out in white letters nearly a metre high across a concrete beam above what was the main floor of the large building (pictured right). Remnant paint still swirling out from a bucket in the photographed pool indicated that said pleasure was had fairly recently.
Architectural intention
As young architects, Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of the firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia worked with the Catholic Church of Scotland on an unprecedented number of projects during the post-war building boom. With its innovative design and significant scale, St Peter’s College was regarded as the apex of this collaboration. The young architects showed little restraint in borrowing contemporary architectural language from the International or modernist style acquired during their education at the Glasgow School of Art. Their referencing of Le Corbusier is so assertive that it is possible to read St Peter’s Seminary as a condensed composite of Corbusian quotations. Specific references such as the signature ceiling and irregularly proportioned windows at Ronchamp (1954) or the rock texture of the exterior walkway at the Dominican Order priory of La Tourette (1960) sit alongside more pervasive features of Corbusier’s practice, such as roughly textured concrete and pilotis to lift a building off the ground, vaulted ceilings, pools at the foot of a building, and angled ramps to accommodate level changes. Other specific parallels include the organic curve of the concrete wall of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (1963) and the open interior staircases and glassing-in of the main communal spaces at La Tourette. Stanislaus von Moos observed that Le Corbusier 'was never particularly worried by the distressing spectacle of the rapid deterioration of most of his buildings as long as one thing remained intact: the idea, the pure form, as it is preserved forever in the seven volumes of his Oeuvre complète'.[2] It is arguable that this lack of concern regarding deterioration could have been inherited from Le Corbusier through such a thorough appropriation of his vocabulary.
In Brian Dillon's short novel Sanctuary, the protagonist looks through a research file on St Peter’s compiled by her missing boyfriend, 'Among these reports she discovers several interviews with the architects, one of whom, a decade and a half after the seminary closed, professed to enjoy the idea of the building being reduced to its concrete skeleton and becoming a picturesque ruin.'[3] The romance of the ruin has not fallen out of favour. The popularity of Piranesi’s etchings of a crumbling Rome in the eighteenth century and John Michael Gandy’s fantastical nineteenth-century watercolour painting of John Soane’s rotunda of the Bank of England as a picturesque ruin laid the groundwork for a twentieth-century architect desirous of early dereliction to be merely adhering to tradition.
Movement intervention
The novella Sanctuary by Brian Dillon largely consists of a comprehensive account of the protagonist’s phenomenological experiencing of St Peter's Seminary. The narrative thread centres on the search for a missing person last reported to be visiting the derelict site. The question of whether this person is dead or alive can be transferred to the seminary itself. A site visit in preparation for the movement intervention proved an intense experience with potent stimuli. Stepping through a forced gap in the high fence as means of gaining access to the grounds did not instil a sense of confidence or security, despite being the advice of trusted sources. The anticipation of danger posed by the crumbling building, copious broken glass and metal remnants, the many ledges without railings, and the potential presence of squatters or other individuals was enough to keep one’s guard up at all times. This anticipation amplified the atmosphere of decay and demise – the building as a carcass. However, visual occurrences such as young trees remarkably forcing themselves up through the concrete, a sight line offering perfectly aligned columns and intersecting staircases, or the impressive altar lit without the hindrance of windows and stripped down to bare concrete offer a sense of natural or visual order and vitality, easing the feeling of chaos and imminent danger.
The seminary did not give the impression of being structurally sound; its existence felt precarious. As Crowther states, 'Architecture’s phenomenological depth centres on its clarification and enhancement of our cognitive inherence in the world as embodied subjects.'[4] It is easy to connect this experience of precariousness to the building project’s burdens throughout, be they structural, political, or monetary. The intervention was informed by the phenomenological aspects of the site visit in that the structure of the performers’ bodies mirrored the architectural structure. The tensional quality of supporting a dead weight is a common experience of the human body. The transference of experience of the crumbling and collapsing seminary to the body became the starting point for the intervention.
In the photograph St Peter’s Seminary (on the Artworks page), a figure squats low to the ground with another figure draped over her. Together they form a larger mass perched on slender anatomical supports similar to the way that the bulk of the main building was built atop stilts. They are located in the former refectory in the gap that existed between the seating area and a wall of windows. The air temperature in this formerly enclosed area would have been low due to its proximity to such large north-facing windows. The woman in the fore gazes out from what was an underdetermined space of the building. She would likely have been faced with her reflection if the glass were still in place, ensuring her knowledge of the second figure behind her. However, the glass is long gone and her reflection now appears in the rainwater-filled pool between herself and the viewer. Does she look in the direction of the former window in search of the displaced reflection, without an understanding of the building’s current state? Or might the reverse be true: does she turn away from the mirroring surface of the water? Is the second figure a burden being denied, or might the figure in the fore admire this configuration if she were able to locate her reflection?
Perhaps this conjoined Narcissus refuses to acknowledge disappointment or to experience a sense of failure; or she could be taking pleasure in the ruin with a sincere yet unsuccessful pursuit of self-admiration. A similarly confused narcissism in Le Corbusier’s architectural practice is described by Beatriz Colomina: 'It becomes evident that for Le Corbusier any document from the process, which better reflects the concept of the house, takes precedence over the faithful representation of the actual built work.'[5] It seems that a reflection of the ideal trumps the realities of the world, with power being the volition to look or look away. Furthermore, this intensive pursuit of the ideal, resulting in a condensed accumulation of quotations, may leave very little space within a built environment that remains interstitial or underdetermined. Such spaces provide a building with a certain degree of give or flexibility, some room to move, so to speak. This sort of inflexibility may have been a contributing factor in St Peter's early descent into disuse.
[1] Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1953), p. 454.
[2] Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979; repr. 1985), p. 301.
[3] Brian Dillon, Sanctuary (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), pp. 66–67.
[4] Paul Crowther, The Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame)(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 185.
[5] Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 111.
Top row: Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, and St Peter's Seminary.
Second row: Convent of La Tourette and St Peter's Seminary.
Third row: Maisons Jaoul and St Peter's Seminary.
Fourth row: Carpenter Building and St Peter's Seminary.
