St Peter’s Seminary, a ruinous masterpiece of religious modernism near the northern shores of the Clyde, is being remade. Not with concrete, steel and glass, but by light and amplified sound. And all of it orchestrated under cover of darkness in the woodlands of Kilmahew Estate near Cardross.
The former seminary, built a full 50 years ago by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, has been chosen for the launch of the 2016 Festival of Architecture, orchestrated by the environmental and public artists NVA. Its ten-night long production Hinterland has been sold out, and ticket holders travelling in expectation of floodlighting and grandstanding will leave disappointed.
Instead, there is clever economy in design. The show’s craft is based not so much on lighting the building, as lighting the building’s spaces.
Colour plays across a hundred and more cellular squares of the former accommodation block for seminarians, rippling, then shuttling, hither and thither. An exterior façade that can look gap-toothed in daylight appears spectral and charmed when illuminated at night.
In the cavernous interior, kaleidoscopic effects vie for attention, setting the world on a tilt. Pooled water is used to produce a black mirror, onto whose surface is reflected the illuminated upper levels of the superstructure. Spectators turn into a congregation, staring reverently into the floor to see a negative image of everything towering overhead.
The dramatic ritual of Mass and ceremony of worship is respectfully reworked. Choral music, the work of composer Rory Boyle, invites a serenity of mood. Suspended on chains, a giant thurible intermittently dispenses draughts of dry ice (rather than burning incense). Swinging duties are the charge of a shadowy pairing.
Black-clad, they pace the outer edge of what once was the sanctuary, returning to operate a mysterious workstation. Would-be altar servers? Tech-priests? Or two DJs perhaps, a knowing nod to the ruin’s sacrilegious episode as a ravaged venue for spectacular, illegal raves?
Hinterland is complex and multifaceted, a heritage tour with twists and turns. While transport by courtesy bus is no match for a horse-drawn carriage, arrival at the site recalls the Victorian landscape history of Kilmahew Estate; a period when ornamental promenading was all the rage.
Each nightwalker is issued with a glowing staff. To build suspense before the big reveal, a woodland route is traced, sedately paced to take in pleasing decorative relics. A petite ironwork bridge crosses the burbling burn. Rhododendron bushes trained into a fairytale tunnel enclose the uphill path. Former landscape designs get warped and addled by the sound of musique concrète emanating from, well, who can tell exactly where?
Critics of public art take note: Hinterland is no parachute performance. It showcases giant steps already taken by NVA towards the radical reinvention of St Peter’s, and plans to allow permanent ownership of the greater estate grounds. Though as creative director Angus Farquhar will stress, it only marks the stepping off point for the second-half of a marathon salvage effort.
NVA is a small, feisty organisation with a very big imagination: its previous works have animated the natural theatricality of country and city. It has made grand spectacles of the Storr rock formation on the Isle of Skye, Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, and Argyll’s Kilmartin Glen.
Now their spotlight is trained on the most challenging arena for art yet. Just 30 minutes by train from Glasgow city centre, Kilmahew has felt like the faraway nearby.
In 1966, its genteel landscaping was estranged by what amounted to an architectural eruption. Endorsed by the Roman Catholic church, the seminary was the product of a creative partnership between Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of architectural practice Gillespie, Kidd & Coia.
Even if it dared the eye and defied convention, sadly St Peter’s never did work as ‘a machine for living in’; the definition coined by Le Corbusier to describe the harmonious settlement between structure and purpose. Rainwater defined the life of the building, and rainwater is what did for it in the end too. It is said that even on ribbon-cutting day, the buckets to catch leaks outnumbered the seminarians. Water pooled on rooftops, spilling down and riddling the built fabric.
But St Peter’s has never failed as art. With each phase in the seminary’s existence, first as vanguard architecture, then dilapidated ruin and now live art landscape, its numinous aspects are revealed anew. Even in the dark St Peter’s seems a brighter place.
NVA’s vision for the ruin’s future is one faithful to the democratic ideal of ancient Greece that the organisation originally took its name from: ‘Nationale Vita Activa’ (the right to influence public affairs). Kilmahew-St Peter’s is imagined not as a place to consume culture. Instead, it is a landscape where art performs itself into being, and as a consolidated building serving as a chora for debate and performance, elevated thought and informal learning.
