The Modernist Ruin

24 Feb 2006

There is no doubt that the current state of St. Peter’s has prompted a complex debate among fans and detractors alike. To decode the multiple messages that degraded Modernism sends out, however, one should understand that this argument has a historical context.

The Seminary of St Peters at Cardross, built by Gillespie, Kidd and Coia between 1958 and 1966, is one of Scotland’s best-known modern buildings. It is also one of its most spectacular ruins.
You approach it by a track to the now-demolished Kilmahew House. The track winds picturesquely through deciduous woodland with occasional glimpses of the Clyde and the southern hills beyond. You get your first sight of the cliff-like seminary after a few minutes. It looks fine from this point; through the trees, the concrete structure is clearly visible, as is the vaulting of the individual cells. In fine weather the whole thing glows as the sun hits it, and has the same warm tonality as Basil Spence’s buildings at the University of Sussex, which it also formally resembles. You walk on a little further and the building recedes back into the trees, to then re-emerge suddenly at the main entrance. Here – you are only a few yards away now – its condition is all too obvious. It is in terrible shape. There is no glass anywhere in what was a heavily glazed structure. The interior is totally ruined. Great waves of wooden panelling hang down from the ceiling and flap in the breeze, rotting where they touch the floor. Water lies everywhere in stagnant pools or drips from mysterious places. Stairs are all rotted away. Anything that can be claimed by rot or decay has been, or is well on the way. There are signs of some terrific parties, however; there’s graffiti and trash everywhere, while someone’s taken a sledgehammer to the altar and nearly split it in two. The roof above is gone, the great wooden beams supporting it taken by a huge blaze. It has been systematically and savagely attacked, yet remains structurally huge and dignified, and defiantly modern. It is the most extraordinary sight.
Now the ruin has been a vital part of western culture since at least the 17th century. For the 18th-century Grand Tourist as much as Freud, ruins prompted a pleasurable sense of melancholy, and the opportunity to reflect, at a safe historical remove, on the transience of human achievements. But their ruins were ancient, and Cardross is not. Its architecture may not be exactly contemporary but it is nevertheless of the contemporary world. Most Prospect readers grew up in spaces like those at Cardross, at least some of the time; they are the open, unfussy, humanistic spaces of the welfare state, familiar to any British state school child of the post-war period, or any student who studied at one of the so-called ‘plate glass universities’ set up in the 1960s. To see a contemporary space in this condition promotes not melancholy reflection (as the ancient ruin did) but more likely feelings of shock, revulsion or even horror. Yet as with surrealism in art, there is a peculiar pleasure in these things, and this pleasure helps suggest an alternative history of the ruin.
Such a history might begin with John Soane, and the vogue for pictures of ruined contemporary buildings, which he helped cultivate. But I think it is an essentially modern taste. I would start with the Architectural Review just after the Second World War, and its photo-reportage of bombed London by John Piper and JM Richards. The book that resulted, The Bombed Buildings of Britain, is still an extraordinary document, in which an aesthetic is claimed from the still-smoking ruins of the city. The immediacy of the destruction takes this taste in ruins far from the picturesque. The shattered buildings are all there is of the contemporary world, not a spectacle of past destruction, comfortably distanced.
The Architectural Review soon moved on to other things. But in the mid-1960s, the American artist Robert Smithson developed a line in ruinous imagery, in which the modern world invariably finds itself assailed by the forces of decay. A favourite device is the deliberate misreading of a building or place such that construction appears to be terminal decay. So in the well-known photo-essay, The Monuments of Passaic (1967), a highway under construction through a New Jersey suburb is said to “rise into ruin”. The building works are represented in Smithson’s ironic snaps as a landscape of destruction, which he ironically compares to the ruins of ancient Rome. In Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) Smithson erected a simple building and had it destroyed by piling earth on top of it until its main beam cracks; it was photographed in various states of decay. Hotel Palenque (1972), a slide show with a taped commentary, originally given as a lecture to Yale architecture students, has Smithson exploring a small Mexican motel, in which renovation work has clearly gone terribly wrong. The distinction between construction and destruction is profoundly unclear, and Smithson does nothing to assist matters. His lugubrious commentary revels in the hotel’s dreadful decline; here, as elsewhere, he loves the way rot and decay overtake the contemporary world, an illustration, as he repeatedly insisted, of the physical principle of entropy.
Later artists explored some of the same things. In the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark famously cut a suburban house in two, and then shot out the windows of New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Resources with a rifle. More recently, in Britain, Rachel Whiteread has photographed the destruction of modern public housing in England, while her sculpture (most famously House) has turned domestic architecture into de facto tombs.
But it is Smithson’s pleasure in decay that comes closest to the experience that one has on visiting St Peter’s; it is the evident transience of the place, the fact that it is literally collapsing about one’s ears, that makes it so affecting, and alarming. This is what the architect Bernard Tschumi tried to describe in a visit to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in 1965, before restoration, when it too seemed in a state of terminal decay. In his retrospective account of that visit, Architecture and Transgression (1976), Tschumi argued that it was the very condition of decay that produced a sense of heightened awareness of the space; because of the filthy and dangerous condition, the visitor could not fail to comprehend it. “Stinking of urine, smeared with excrement and covered with obscene graffiti,” he wrote, “the Villa Savoye was never so moving as when the plaster fell off its concrete blocks.” The experience he had there at the ruined Villa Savoye was what he called “the moment of architecture” – he explained – “that moment when architecture is life and death at the same time, when the experience of space becomes its own concept.” This “moment”, he went on, was achieved when a building, paradoxically, reached the point of collapse.
Now, Tschumi’s piece is a polemic, and few will accept its conclusions unconditionally. But it does articulate a particular problem of St Peter’s condition – that as a contemporary ruin it is more moving than it would be fully restored, or stabilised. How to incorporate these views in any discussion about its future is open to question. But as a starting point, it is worth admitting that for many, St Peter’s appeal lies not so much in its architecture, as its marvellous decay.