Why We Should Save St Peters

24 Feb 2006

The story of the architectural careers of Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan runs in parallel with the period of post war expansion best captured by the expression ‘Welfarism’. From the late 1950s, in the practice Gillespie Kidd and Coia (GKC), Metzstein and Macmillan enjoyed two exceptionally productive decades of design work in which they built homes, hospitals, schools, colleges and churches. Through that body of work they established GKC as a key player in British modernism. When in 1969 Jack Coia won the RIBA’s Gold Medal, it was in a large part a recognition of the radical work undertaken by the office’s young architects. Metzstein had just turned 40.
GKC’s recognition as modernist architects began with the publication of St Paul’s, Glenrothes in 1956. The project attracted the attention of Sir Leslie Martin, the head of London County Council and architect of the Royal Festival Hall, which in turn led to commissions in England. The GKC story ended with the completion of Robinson College Cambridge in 1980 - the practice was eventually wound up 1986. The end of the practice coincided with the birth of Post-modernism, the end of post-war expansion and the dismantling of public sector architecture offices., factors that contributed to a major shift in the status of the architectural profession. Since the early 1980s both Metzstein and MacMillan have exerted a formidable influence on the architectural profession in Scotland and beyond through their roles as teachers at the Mac and Edinburgh University, but their most important legacy is their buildings.
In the first decade of collaboration Isi and Andy cut their teeth on a series of commissions provided by the Roman Catholic Church. Starting with St Paul’s Glenrothes, the pair were in the privileged position of being given the freedom, by the client and Coia, to produce a number of small radical churches. They were “operating at a high level of creative achievement…at times it seemed as if they were the only people in Scotland that were really trying,” wrote John Richards, an architect and partner at RMJM, who himself embodied the idea of professional conviction.
The climax to that first decade was St Peter’s Cardross which was completed in 1966. It incorporates many of the radical ideas developed by GKC as a result of ten years of enlightened patronage by the Catholic Church. After St Peter’s GKC won commissions for university buildings in Hull, at Wadham College, Oxford and Robinson College, Cambridge, but their relationship with the Catholic Church faded. St Peter’s is still Metzstein and MacMillan’s best Scottish building and it occupies a special position in the short-lived history of modernism in Scotland.
Although undoubtedly a modernist building, St Peter’s is best described as Late Modernist. Although it was not particularly self-conscious or polemical, GKCs work was both an argument with modernism as well as part of the modernist tradition. The stated aim of functionalism was to liberate architecture from traditional forms and orders and allow the functional imperative to drive the design process. Late Modernism was grounded on the basic principles of the functionalism, but recognised the intuitive side of the design process and took pleasure in the use of traditional materials and building techniques as well as industrialised production.
“We were trying to extend the language of modern architecture, not change its stripes,” explains Metzstein. The move from a perfunctory modernism towards more expressive forms and contextual buildings was expressed in the work produced by many European modernists in the post war period, such as Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer. St Peter’s is clearly influenced by La Tourette, Le Corbusier’s monastery near Lyon, but it is not, as some have suggested, a copy of Corbusier’s building. La Tourette had very similar accommodation to St Peter’s but a different programme. What the buildings shared in common is a creative attitude towards the programme. “Ultimately we were disillusioned with mainstream modernism, which had become dogmatic. Design is not about the mere interpretation of the programme. Committed architects add to the problems and then solve the additional difficulty,” says Metzstein.
The briefs provided by the church to their architects were often simple - ‘to build a church for 400 with accommodation’. The challenge for GKC, as secular architects, was to create ‘sacred space’. The church had 1,000 years of good practice behind it and its users had years of understanding of what church might look like. Metzstein and MacMillan were charged with taking that traditional understanding and translating it into a modern language. They used secular buildings as their guides, buildings such as Glasgow School of Art. “GSA has a rich, compact Victorian plan. Modern building regulations prohibited that depth of building, but we turned away from the narrow, single-banked corridor in a deliberate effort to get away from simplistic formulations of modern buildings,” says Metzstein.
At St Paul’s, Glenrothes, GKC created a single space church, with very little applied decoration and high-level windows that cast shadows across the back wall. The church is very small, but it has a modern ‘tower’, which throws light from above onto the altar. “We knew that the church had different parts of the building that emerged and disappeared as you moved around it,” recalls Metzstein. At St Brides in East Kilbride, GKC created a massive box in which a heavy diaphragm wall punched with light holes carried the deep span roof. In the design the architects explored the issue entry; how the designer signals the move from external to internal space. It used cut bricks and special coursing patterns to resolve the issues of scale, texture and entry and they took great pleasure in working with bricklayers in the design and construction.
St Peter’s is the concrete expression of that understanding informed by a decade’s exploration of modern church architecture and refined through a strong creative partnership. Today, it is difficult to fully appreciate GKC’s achievement at Cardross because a key component of the composition, the original Kilmahew House, is missing. St Peter’s consists of four new buildings organised around a court, with the key communal spaces embedded in the heart of the ziggurat-like main block with its fabulous cross-section. GKC had already explored the relationship between cellular units and larger public spaces in the design of Cumbernauld College. To allow for settlement, the classroom block barely touched the main body of the building. The structure of the classroom block was separate from the main building; Metzstein describes them as “kissing”. Together with the original Kilmahew House, which was destroyed by fire in the 1980s, the three elements formed the main enclosure. Slightly dispersed, a convent, kitchen block and sanctuary block completed the composition.
Beyond this highly legible form and plan there was an engaging degree of complexity; routes up between floors by spiral stairs, dark corners and strongly lit forms. There was a lower chapel, which was highly ceremonial, with a major ramp that emerged from behind a curved wall. The programme was complex and specific. The building had no front door, because it wasn’t a public building. Parents would visit once every six months and they would enter through the underpass. Once Kilmahew House was demolished, the front door disappeared.
The relationship between the landscape and the building was always very strong. Today nature has taken over almost complete control. Without exception the people that write about this building find it almost impossible to embark upon a description without beginning with the tale of the approach through woodland and the gradual revealing of the building. “The site was complicated and beautiful, with a pre-existing garden that had been developed by a shipping magnate that collected trees, and so the trees were an essential part of the programme. We wanted to conserve the existing landscape and minimise the impact of the building. The site had been levelled and there were new retaining walls, so the new building had to be shoehorned on the site. Where it was overhanging we cantilevered the building to preserve the autonomy of the landscape,” recalls Metzstein.
Metzstein and MacMillan were also fascinated by light, texture and colour. “At the time quantity of light was seen as important; the quality of light was sacrificed. For us, the way that light was excluded and incorporated was important,” says Metzstein. The decay and maturation of materials and the vandalism has added to the richness of colour and texture at St Peter’s, it always had a warmth and richness. The brown embedded pebbles that face the concrete structure help it blend with the surrounding woodland and careful textured shuttering on the classroom block has grown stronger with the passage of time. Internally there is a strong differentiation between soft and hard materials; the concrete is offset by large areas of pine.
The reason behind the abandonment of St Peter’s in the 1980s and the subsequent dereliction of the building has provoked much debate. Some believe the failure rests with the Church because it commissioned a building that was redundant before it was completed. Others blame the architects for being too ambitious, for experimenting with building materials and creating a building that was neither flexible or watertight. In the RCAHMS publication on the seminary, Diane Watters counter-poses the more socially responsible and restrained work of Robert Matthews with the emphasis on artistic personality in Coia’s office. “The Modern concept of grooming and atelier of young designers to produce individualistic and unconventional design solutions collaboratively was realised, as the practice moved towards a more intuitively artistic approach, in both formal and social-architectural terms … This policy would result in some of the most memorable images of Scottish Modern design, but would also have other, arguably less desirable consequences.” The less desirable consequences that she describes are the problems with damp and water penetration, problems about which the archdiocese made repeated complaints. Undoubtedly the building was hard to maintain, but was this the product of an indulgent individualistic approach or the outcome of a construction industry struggling to deal with new techniques?
Modernist buildings in Britain have suffered technical weaknesses. They were not produced using tried-and-tested models of construction and detailing, but we now have the knowledge and technology to put things right. The work done by the Corbusier Foundation and other similar organisations in Britain, Europe and the USA suggest that we can improve modernist buildings using current knowledge. We have a limited experience of conserving modern buildings in Scotland, but now is clearly the time to learn. Building conservationists and engineers could use the rehabilitation of St Peter’s to gain valuable knowledge to apply to all the other buildings of the period that are likely to become the subject of an appraisal in the near future. In its current state, modern building preservation remains an amateur activity, subsidised by state bodies such and the occasional developer that has a interest in modernism, this cannot continue indefinitely.
Nor should the current condition of the church should not blind us to its importance. As Gavin Stamp wrote in the Mac Journal No 1: “The firm produced modern churches of a sophistication and formal invention which makes them conspicuous in a European content and unparalleled in British terms. The architecture of Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein belongs firmly with the avant-garde European tradition of the twentieth century, but it is distinguished by these architects’ rare power to create memorable, resonant, romantic forms.”
Of course for some, saving modernist buildings in general is an anathema. Some early modernists argued that they were just building for one generation and after that, the buildings should be demolished and new buildings created to meet new needs. Modernism was about creating a blank sheet on which to work, putting aside traditional form and context and creating forms that responded in a more abstract fashion to the demands of programme and time. It’s a sound approach, but should we draw the conclusion from this idea that we should not bother saving modern buildings? While I do not accept the Ruskinian romantic ideas about buildings as the vehicles of memory, it seems a good idea to save the best building produced by any society, regardless of the attitude of those that built it. The conservation of modernism provokes a lot of soul-searching among modernist enthusiasts and a degree of self-criticism which is not exercised by people preserve pre-modern buildings.
Robert Maxwell, writing in Modern Movement Heritage, a book published by Do.co.mo.mo., says that modern ruins provoke a sense of loss and dereliction and through restoration we recover a spiritual impulse “that renders us back our humanity”. This is a rather grand claim for a building. As Richard J Williams argues elsewhere, St Peters is like its peer group, a child of the particular circumstance, growth and post-war optimism. The welfarist programme and the progressive culture in which it was built are resonant in the building, but cannot be reborn through restoration. However, in a world where we live always in the present without much ambition for the future or respect for the past, memory ceases to be a mechanism to make us feel comfortable in an uncertain world. The fact that many people still find the best modern architecture difficult to appreciate is a good reason to conserve it.
Pessimists say it would be good to save Cardross, but without an end-user it is impossible. Are buildings meaningless without function and occupation? It’s a difficult question to answer. The world would certainly be a poorer place without the reconstructed Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. However, the construction of Glasgow’s House for an Art Lover from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s drawings is of questionable value. It is easy to take the moral high ground and demand a more rigorous approach to the needs of the end-user when looking at contemporary icons. Zaha Hadid’s recently completed Wolfsburg Science Centre is a fine piece of sculpture, but where are the exhibits? It is much harder to mark out that territory where architecture is art but avoids drifting into the realm of indulgence. Architecture is about both programme and passion.
St Peter’s is worth saving because of its significance in the history of architecture in Scotland but, more importantly, it is worth re-using because it is an exquisite piece of architecture that will bring joy and satisfaction to its users and visitors. It’s worth keeping in the same way that it is worth keeping a Henry Moore and not melting it for scrap. Occasionally it is worth saving a building without a reasonable function; projects such as Mackintosh’s Hill House or the Barcelona Pavilion set the standard. We may be overly preoccupied with our heritage but we are also trapped in the present. We have a blind spot when it comes to the recent past and we tend to undervalue the achievements of the preceding two or three generations. If you still can’t see its worth, imagine St. Peter’s through the eyes of future generations and that should do it