Claudia Massie

Dying of the light | 25 February 2016

The brutalist beauty that is St Peter’s Seminary has lain in ruins for decades. This March it is brought back to life as part of Scotland’s Festival of Architecture 2016

issue 27 February 2016

Finding St Peter’s is not straightforward. I approach the wrong way, driving up a pot-holed farm track between a golf club and a wood until a fly-tipped sofa blocks my way. Beyond the sofa, behind padlocked security fencing, stands an old stone bridge. Someone has sprayed ‘Go Home’ on the pillar. I prowl through the wood, hoping to find a way in, and scramble across a gorge to the rear edge of the building. More security fencing, through which I see tantalising glimpses of brutal, and brutalised, architecture. Two workmen appear, dressed like crime-scene investigators in blue hooded overalls, and I lean nonchalantly against the fence and talk about the site. I propose a quick tour of the interior but receive an emphatic response, ‘Not a chance, hen.’ They disappear and I am left behind the fence, looking at Scotland’s greatest modern building from a distance.

St Peter’s Seminary is both the country’s most important 20th-century structure and its most embarrassing architectural story.

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