Arts charity NVA to reinvent the ruins of St Peter's seminary

St Peter's seminary, Cardross, Scotland Something sinister seems to have happened in the woods between Dumbarton and Helensburgh, 20 miles west of Glasgow in the Scottish lowlands. The ruined structure that sits there recalls the post-apocalyptic "Zone" in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979). Greasy puddles reflect a leaden sky, charred rafters hang precipitously, crushed beer cans and vodka bottles mixed in with mud and moss make a precarious carpet. The ground squelches and crunches. But the space inside the concrete shell somehow retains its strong sense of architectural conviction.

This is the seminary of St Peter's, Kilmahew, the remains of a building that was opened in 1966 but has been derelict for many years. Designed by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan, architects from the firm of Gillespie Kidd and Coia (both in their early thirties at the time, both now sadly dead), this decaying hulk is revered as perhaps the greatest monument of Scottish modernism.

Yet, like so many of the landmarks of modernism, it was a failure. It failed in its mission and it failed in its basic task of keeping the weather out. The Catholic church couldn't wait to get rid of it. It lasted 16 years as a seminary and limped on for a few more as a treatment centre for addicts before being entirely abandoned. Now it is about to get a new lease of life, in an unusual scheme that promises to reinvent the site as an arts venue, while preserving its air of desolation.

St Peter's was built on the grounds of the baronial Kilmahew House. The house itself burnt down in 1995, after a troubling site history of (in the Glasgow vernacular) "going on fire". The seminary became a victim not just of its own architectural inadequacies but also of changes in the Catholic church: a shortage of candidates for the priesthood, the slow collapse of influence and income, and the increasing acceptance that novitiates should be trained in the parishes in which they were going to work.

Yet its failure has enabled a subsequent history of creative appropriation. Bored teenagers, addicts, artists, architectural tourists, free-runners, death-metal fans, psychogeographers and assorted crazies have all left their marks.

The seminary's future has been debated for 20 years or more. It could have been turned into a boutique hotel (an option favoured by Metzstein) or an arts centre, but that would strip it of the narrative of neglect and occasional occupation that makes it so powerful as a place. Which makes the news that St Peter's is to be partly consolidated and partly brought back into use by the impressive Glasgow-based arts charity NVA both initially troubling and ultimately comforting. Troubling, because the thrill of St Peter's is the contrast between yesterday's modernist hubris and today's dereliction. Comforting, because NVA appears to be sensitive to that: its approach is delicately to insert a component that will allow the site to function as a venue without compromising its atmosphere.

The plan is to create flexible public space for events and installations at the heart of the building, around the site of the altar, while consolidating the ruins so that they are safe - but still suitably decrepit. Architects NORD are designing the intervention, together with modernist conservation specialists Avanti, both are practices with considerable sympathy for the original intentions of the architects and for the arresting effects of decay. NVA has raised around £5m, including a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is actively fundraising for a further £2m.

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Such morbid interest in architectural memento mori has a long pedigree. From the engravings of Giovanni Piranesi, depicting the ruins of Rome as an overpowering background to the 18th-century city, to Albert Speer's notion of "ruin value" for Hitler's rebuilding of Berlin, architects and artists have persistently returned to the idea of what kind of corpses our cities will leave.

Yet there is something particularly unsettling about the ruins of modernism. St Peter's has remained such a potent symbol partly because its failure underlines the difficulties facing the Catholic church in Scotland - and the broader decline in churchgoing in the UK - and partly because it stands for the struggle for survival of a kind of architecture that was once so strident and confident. At least the ruins remain, which is more than can be said for some of the other great moments of 1960s architecture, from the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Birmingham Central Library to the commercial buildings of the City of London that been swept aside by shinier and duller, if more efficient, successors.

Among architects there may be huge reverence for St Peter's - some still dream of building in this language, with its sculptural freedom and structural experimentation - but it also stands as a reminder of a visionary style that has proved surprisingly fragile. Medieval monasteries and abbeys survived their dissolution for hundreds of years as romantic ruins; St Peter's may not survive even this century without care and consolidation. Reinforcement bars are rusting and destroying the concrete from inside, even as it spalls on the outside, and toxic asbestos lurks in walls and in mounds of rubble. Brutalism, it transpires, is disappointingly delicate.

St Peter's may be one of Scotland's great monuments but at the heart of its narrative, alongside its inventive architecture, is the story of its own failure. If NVA's ambitious intervention can maintain the richness of that story, it will have done modernism's fraught legacy a huge service.

nva.org.uk

Slideshow photographs: Tom Kidd/Alamy; GKC Archive/Glasgow School of Art; HE Media; NVA

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