For one of the most infamous and highly regarded modernist buildings in the UK, St Peter’s Seminary was obsolete even before it opened. Created by the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland as a secluded training center for young priests, the build took place on a country estate an hour west of Glasgow along the north bank of the River Clyde between 1961 and its opening in 1966. During this time the seminary’s existence was superseded by the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, which decreed that priests should instead be trained within the communities they were intended to serve. Its purpose was gone.
The Church ceased using the building in 1980, and for the best part of the next decade, it found more prosaic new use as a drug rehabilitation center, eventually being abandoned altogether. The central Victorian house of the old Kilmahew Estate was destroyed by fire in 1995, and the more contemporary extensions have fallen victim to vandalism, graffiti, further fires and in some places catastrophic erosion. All of which adds to the mystery of St Peter’s Seminary. It’s category A-listed by Historic Scotland; in 2008 it was added to the World Monument Fund’s watch list of 100 most endangered sites of cultural heritage, and heritage body Docomomo lists it as “a building of world significance”.
For urban explorers, chroniclers of the hauntingly abandoned and those whose appetites to view the ruined feeds a growing online subculture, St Peter’s Seminary has earned legendary status. For the last eight years, it’s also held a deep and obsessive fascination for Angus Farquhar, the creative director and driving force of the Glasgow-based public art practitioners NVA. This month, NVA will open St Peter’s Seminary to the public for “Hinterland”, a sound and light installation which will show this famous ruin in a new light. It’s also the first step, hopes Farquhar, in new life for the building as a performance space, artists’ retreat, public artwork and enduring monument to the often unfulfilled post-war optimism of the late 20th century.
It’s the kind of work he wants to see created here, in a place he says is still distinctly special despite all that’s been done to it. “There’s something in the bones of St Peter’s that still has an atmosphere which transcends the incredible violence that’s been acted upon it by three intentional fires and a huge amount of vandalism and theft. Metzstein and MacMillan really got something right in terms of the way they modulated light and how it came into the building, it feels like nowhere else I’ve been in the UK. Even in the secular setting, I think there’s something about ritual, about that sense of using prescribed physical movements and text and speech and song in a way that can intensify and deepen people’s experience of a particular location, and we’re definitely playing with that in Hinterland.”
In a ruin of the past such as this, believes Farquhar, we can also more easily grasp a hold on where we need to be in the present. “I guess the question which a lot of us are asking is: what sort of world do we live in now?” he says. “As an artist, I don’t want to make peripheral work which sits within an elite, hermetically sealed bubble for those who’ve got time to dwell on the finer points of art. As an artist, I want to engage with the horror and complexity of the world as it is now and try and do something that is relevant, and create a space where people can come and can debate, see work, be inspired, find out things for themselves. And all of this in a space that was designed for elevated thinking to take place.” independent.co.uk
