In an article for The Guardian, Rowan Moore explores the state and future of the Grade A listed Brutalist Seminary of St. Peter, "where the influence of Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette combines with [...] Scottish inspirations." Although the building is often seen as wholly unique in the canon of religious buildings, it is still comprised of traditional elements - "cloister, chapel, refectory, cells - but rearranged over multiple levels in unexpected ways, alternately enclosing and opening up to its surroundings."
You can still detect moments of grace in a fragment of handrail. There is still poise in its balance of forces, in the way its crowning concrete ziggurat comes to earth on columns that look too slight for the task. Its basilica, caked in graffiti, but with openings to the sky and trees, alternately radiant and sombre in the changeable weather, remains spiritual.
Having been abandoned for the past 25 years, London-based Avanti Architects along with Glasgow-based ERZ Landscape Architects and NORD Architects, recently released the first images of their design to revitalise the seminary. Originally designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1966, and built on the former Kilmahew Estate, the structure was voted as the best modern building in Scotland by readers of Prospect Magazine in 2005.
Read Moore's article on the seminary here.
Avanti and NORD Selected to Revitalize St Peter's Seminary in Scotland
