David Pollock on NVA’s plans to turn St Peter’s Seminary into ‘invisible college’

FOR most of us, St Peter’s Seminary is a myth – perhaps the most famous building in Scotland that nearly all of the country’s inhabitants have never visited.

FOR most of us, St Peter’s Seminary is a myth – perhaps the most famous building in Scotland that nearly all of the country’s inhabitants have never visited. Regularly cited by architecture spotters as one of the greatest late-modernist buildings in Europe, it’s a ghost space now, long since abandoned from its original use as a priests’ training college and a short-lived latter life as a drug rehab centre.

Since the late 1980s it has existed only in the public consciousness through Murray Grigor’s formal 1972 documentary on the place, a spectral meditation on priests moving through its brutalist corridors.

Many of we followers of its legend are happy to believe the building’s reputation is well deserved, but we want to experience something of what apparently made it one of Scotland’s finest examples of post-war architecture, rather than merely reading about the ziggurat lighting panels on the roof which cast hard, heavenly shadows onto the priests as they said Mass. And help is finally at hand.

Following their high-profile participatory public artwork Speed of Light, staged on Arthur’s Seat as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, public arts organisation NVA’s plans for the site are now on show in Glasgow, alongside Grigor’s original film and a shot-for-shot 2009 remake which reveals the disintegration of the space.

The Seminary at Cardross near Helensburgh was designed by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of Glasgow architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. Despite an A-listing from Historic Scotland and inclusion on the World Monument Fund’s Hundred Most Endangered Sites list, the building is now a shell. However it’s precisely this decrepitude which NVA, together with architects ERZ and Avanti, wish to exploit.

The intention, says NVA’s creative director Angus Farquhar, isn’t to stage a redevelopment potentially runningto the tens of millions of pounds, but rather – with the support of the Scottish Government and private backers – establish what NVA call the Invisible College, based on the ideas fomented by 17th century philosopher Robert Boyle.

Redeveloping the chapel at the heart of the seminary but leaving the rest of the building as it is, NVA believes the site can be used as one of “inquiry and investigation”, involving academics (the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde are already supporting the project), artists and local people in projects and field trips which explore the particular history and resonances of the site. This “recycling” of the space will also open it up to use for site-responsive performances and exhibitions.

“You’d be used to seeing buildings like this by Le Corbusier in the south of France,” says Farquhar, “but it’s rare for a piece of bold, brutalist modern architecture to appear in a rural setting in the west of Scotland. For many people it represents a spirit that we don’t see enough of in Scotland, and the loss of it has been seen as a potential national disgrace.”

He quotes a target fundraising figure of £5 million to complete the project which seems like a radical solution and an innovative statement that architecture and finance need not necessarily go hand in hand.

• NVA’s plans are on display at the Churches in the Modern World exhibition at the Lighthouse, Glasgow. www.nva.org.uk, www.theinvisiblecollege.org.uk