St. Peter’s Seminary is a former Roman Catholic seminary near Cardross, Argyll and Bute, Scotland. Designed by the firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, it has been described by the international architecture conservation organisation DOCOMOMO as a modern “building of world significance”.[1] It is one of only 42 post-war buildings in Scotland to be listed at Category A, the highest level of protection for a building of “special architectural or historic interest”.[2][3] It has been abandoned since 1987, and is currently in a ruinous state…determinedly modernist, brutalist and owing a huge debt to Le Corbusier, the seminary is widely considered[by whom?] to be one of the most important examples of modernist architecture in Scotland.”
That’s from wikipedia, which also points out that ‘nothing prepares you for the right of the new grown prematurely old’ & some have said that the site feels beaten, unhappy but I’m here to tell you that it is anything but.
It’s awe-inspiring. A brilliant, noble folly, badly timed and doomed to fail, reclaimed as a beating heart for new living things. You’ll not find such beautiful painting many other places, a perfect canvas for artists with nowhere else to be, this place holds on, exists wherever and for whatever people need. I find walking around it to be euphoric & inspirational. If you get chance to visit, you really should. It’s a precious ruin, a more sacred thing now as a powerful corpse than it ever was in life.
If anyone can resuscitate it then I hope they do. It’d be worth whatever happened here. If not, let it be what it is, let people come, let them explore and understand the impermanent nature of everything, that the fact there is no god is not a scary, harmful desecration but instead an inspirational message of the hope & strength of nature, of which religion & you are an equal part.
You’ll not wander a special place such as this, desacralised or otherwise.
