St Peter’s Seminary

St Peter’s Seminary lies less than five miles away from where I now live and yet until very recently, I was entirely unaware of its existence. Built between 1961 and 1966 by Glasgow architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, it is one of only 42 Grade-A-listed post-WWII buildings in Scotland and an incredible example of the Brutalist architecture pioneered by the likes of Le Corbusier. The Brutalist style was favoured in particular by governmental and institutional buildings between the 1950’s and 70’s with constructions being massive and fortress-like, favouring exposed concrete and brickwork and being particularly devoted to showing on the outside the internal workings and people-flows of the space within.
Despite its imposing grandeur, by the time the seminary was completed in 1966 the number of candidates entering the priesthood saw a sharp decline and the building never reached its full capacity of 100 students. It was finally abandoned completely in the 1980’s.

 

Now, there are several key points that intrigue me about St Peter’s Seminary that I’ll return to in greater detail in my research.
First, its Brutalist architecture – the stark concrete and exposed brickwork seem a rather violent contrast to the delicate embellishment and convolutions of religious spaces gone before, and yet the style itself, in a pleasantly ironic way, seeks to expose its own inner workings and purposes for all to see.
Second, on a more conceptual level, the notion of a religious purpose frustrated and rendered fruitless, or a full-on refusal of divinity and the pilgrimage required to seek it. Just as almost every great story within every branch of mythology worldwide will feature a hero embarking on a quest or a journey to seek their own purpose and their own bliss, there are oft-forgotten parts the detail that hero’s inner turmoil, the divine help they may reject or the wrong path they may contemplate.
I’m interested in the consequences of that kind of refusal and those kinds of wrong decisions.