Joss Durnan - To Ruin a Ruin?

ISSUE 55

THE DROUTH

SUMMER 2016

To Ruin a Ruin?

On the eighteenth of March arts charity NVA launched Hinterland, their sound and light installation at St. Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, marking the beginning of the building’s restoration three decades after its abandonment.

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(Source: Joss Durnan)

ISSUE 55

THE DROUTH

SUMMER 2016

Joss Alexander Durnan

I was lucky enough to have visited the seminary during the period of abandonment by its legal owners. Once a building carefully designed and planned with religious symbolism and controlled movement built into its fabric, it had become an Commissioned by the Archdiocese of Glasgow in almost unrecognisable husk. Essentially nothing 1958 and designed by architects Andy MacMillan has survived besides the concrete and the and Isi Metzstein of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the asbestos. Its long, dank corridors and dark school for training priests was completed in 1966. crevices filled with burnt bits of building The building was plagued by roof leaks from the and paraphernalia for less-than-scrupulous outset and, with so much open space and glass, activities made it a melancholic and almost was cold. The Catholic Church blamed the uninviting place to visit. It was dangerous: leaks on bad design, the architects on poor the darkness concealed gaping holes into the maintenance by the owner. By the close of the subterranean heating system, exposed asbestos 1980s the Church had abandoned St. Peter’s lay scattered, the concrete had become slick with Seminary. A steel perimeter fence was erected algae. Yet as a space to wander through, meander and the gates chained and padlocked. For the without aim or direction, it was unique. When next three decades it was left to determined first encountering the complex it was difficult to intruders to do with it as they pleased. know where to start. Now too abstract to allow Nature, time, and vandalism took their toll on the any attempt at structured movement, there’s no building, tucked away on an overgrown country obvious entrance or ‘way in,’ you had to find your estate away from the public eye and awareness. own. Once in where you went was entirely up to Unwilling to restore and unable to demolish the you, and was dictated mainly by how willing you now-Category A Listed structure, the Catholic were to push through undergrowth or, if exploring Church handed the building over to NVA, who the building vertically, your bravery. The element announced a partial restoration in 2015. of danger made the feeling of liberation and freedom all the more stark.

The event was billed as “the only opportunity for the public to witness this world-renowned building in its current state of majestic decay” before it undergoes a two-year restoration.

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Le Corbusier, the influential architect of modernism, wrote that the man of reason “walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going” (Corbusier 1924, 274). Continued peregrination through St. Peter’s skeletal remains was a goalless experience, one where no straight line was possible to follow, where reason fractured and gave way to deviant, sensuous wandering. Aimless, the ruin was simply a place for people to be. Other visitors would drift in and out of view like ghosts, contemplative exchanges were had with strangers who appeared as apparitions in that discrete concrete world. As a place it transcended experience of space as art and became experience of time through art.

It is through the last three decades of dereliction that the seminary has been able to take on this unique form. With thirty years of more-or-less unobstructed access, the building has become a complex palimpsest of ungoverned activity at the hands of the transients who were effectively its custodians. Vandalism, drinking, freerunning, sex, drug use, photography, graffiti – St. Peter’s Seminary has inspired a wide spectrum of interactions with its remaining fabric, and most of them manifest in what people have left behind on the walls and on the floors. Walking through the building was to walk through more than thirty years of accumulated human experience.

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SUMMER 2016

When I first heard about the proposed restoration, my question was “how?” but now that has become “why?”. Can a building of such size and physical complexity be (even partly) remade without limitless funds? And even if it can, why bother? It could be argued that to restore the building would rejuvenate it, give it a new lease of life and a purpose. I would, however, argue that it already has a multitude of uses, some of which are evidenced by the material culture strewn around the building’s floors, or sprayed over the walls, or posted on the internet. These uses are what make St. Peter’s Seminary such an interesting place. The danger, the lack of control, and lack of red tape is what has fostered them.

Had it remained in use as it was designed, or been turned into a hotel, or flats, it would still be considered a modernist masterpiece – but not much else. For me, like any archaeological site, it’s the accumulation of years of shit that makes it interesting. The period of abandonment is what has defined this modernist relic, and is why it developed such a cult (and now more mainstream) following. Thus far it has spent much more of its life as an arena for transgressive performance than as a school for priests, or a drug rehabilitation centre. Should we not therefore be doing everything we can to record, preserve and interpret what remains from this, its most defining period?

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THE DROUTH

SUMMER 2016

This is my fear; that the evidence of all the building’s uses post-Seminary – smashed toilet bowls, beer cans, bedrooms gutted by fire, silted up ponds, cryptic graffiti, – will be swept away as rubbish or damaged structural components not worth keeping, with nothing left to speak of the acts that created them except for the photographs that people who had visited the ruin thought worthy to take.

(Source: Joss Durnan)

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To restore it from its state of ruin – to strip it clean and remake it – would render the place largely meaningless. Consider taking an untouched 5000 year-old Neolithic chambered cairn, complete with centuries of later re-use, modification and deterioration, then stripping it out, and attempting to rebuild it as it might have looked on day one. Without recording or keeping anything. St. Peter’s Seminary now stands in the ranks of archaeological sites robbed out in the nineteenth century by antiquarians; places that as a result are able to contribute little to our understanding of the human past and exist primarily as monuments to the ignorance of past practices.

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People are blind to the archaeological merit of this place because the evidence was months to years old rather than centuries or millennia.

But archaeology ultimately amounts to the pursuit of understanding through material remains (Bailey et al 2009, 2) so why should the age of those remains matter? As excavation, archaeology is an inherently destructive process: you only get one shot. Once a site has been excavated, you can never go back to how it was before. The process of excavation preserves through record; anything excavated is recorded in as much detail as possible, from a basic context sheet describing soil characteristics up to an entire digital representation of a site.

An interdisciplinary study, incorporating archaeology, of St. Peter’s Seminary would have been an unparalleled opportunity to push the boundaries of what archaeology is, similar to the University of Bristol’s ‘excavation’ of a Ford Transit van (ibid.).

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For example, much of the building’s biography still lies within living memory. Interviews of the various agents who engaged with the structure (something that is usually an impossibility in archaeology for obvious reasons) could have been contrasted with the material culture they left behind. At the very least, an archaeological investigation of this place could have helped us to understand how it has fallen apart, and understand why people interacted with it in the myriad of ways that they did since the building’s abandonment. Yet I worry that that opportunity may now be lost, that one of the most important and interesting archaeological sites from the close of the second millennium AD is now just another building.

As for how a structure like that might be restored, a short walk around it would highlight the futility of attempting to do so sympathetically. One of the building’s architects (Metzstein) commented that it would be just as difficult to demolish as it was to build. There is asbestos everywhere. In the walls, under the floors, in the ceilings. Steel bolts holding the pebble-faced cladding in place have corroded, expanded, and burst apart the surrounding concrete. Most of the student rooms are burnt or painted beyond recognition. Exposed to the elements, all remaining wood will likely be rotten. The white ceiling arches, delicate steel Hy-rib sheeting clad in plaster, are corroding and crumbling. How can a building in this state be made safe without taking it apart and rebuilding almost all of it? A reclaimed St. Peter’s, whether restored or reimagined, would only ever be a facsimile, a debased shadow of a past vision once realised but now unobtainable.

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Should it therefore be left to continue on its path of ruination, “in a state in which the imaginative brilliance of its structure and spatial arrangements can still be appreciated” (Stamp 2015)? This suggestion presents obvious problems: the deft subtleties of the original design are now lost – most were delimited by slender wooden panels or wide expanses of glass and water, all long gone or vandalised. So on the obverse, to consign the Seminary to a continuing state of ruin would be pointless. A quick Google image search highlights how its condition has drastically deteriorated in the last few years.

Which brings us back to the question: why restore this building? Preserving it for future generations seems a perfectly noble and justified reason. “The long term plans will rescue, restore and reclaim this outstanding example of 20th century architecture,” say NVA. To allow this masterpiece of design to crumble would be considered travesty by many, but the architectural and artistic loss of St. Peter’s Seminary are only facets of a much more complex issue. To gut it of the multitude of objects and scars that tell us the story of its most significant and defining period? I argue that is just as tragic.

A thousand of the best photographs would barely give a taste of what an existential experience it was to walk through this building in its state pre-Hinterland. Yet to witness it in a sustainable form closer to the original vision is a nonetheless tempting prospect. So: destroy it, strip the scarred, charred remnants of flesh from its bones, and build anew; but record it first. Threads of St. Peter’s past could only serve to make the temporal fabric of its biography stronger.

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In a recent Historic Scotland blog post Angus Farquhar, creative director of NVA, explained that: “St Peter’s is an amazing palimpsest that contains so much interesting 20th-century history. By caring about the past, you’re caring about the future and our place within it.”

(McIntosh 2016). Given that the majority of that history has now been erased without first being recorded, I fail to see how NVA are caring for anything besides the (undeniably significant) architectural worth of the building. In the same article, Historic Environment Scotland’s deputy head of designations (listings) actually suggests that this reinvention will allow people to connect with the past. This highlights a deeper misunderstanding of our heritage as the protection of archaeology becomes lost in bureaucracy.

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References Bailey, G. et al 2009 “Transit, Transition: Excavating J641 VUJ” in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19:1, 1-28.

Le Corbusier, 1924 Urbanisme, Paris: Edition Cres.

McIntosh, J. 2016 “Faith, Hope and Brutalism” in The Chain Mail (Historic Scotland blog): www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/blog/faith-hope-and-brutalism/ Stamp, G. 2015 “St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross – better off ruined?” in Apollo Magazine: www.apollo-magazine.com/ st-peters-seminary-in-cardross-better-off-ruined/

The sceptic in me says the whole project stinks of being Angus Farquhar’s vanity project; the optimist breathes a sigh of relief that – finally – something is being done to consolidate this (soon-to-be less) unique place. How will it turn out? Time will tell. Loath to pay the £23 to follow a path through a tidied-up, Disneyland version of a place I could once freely explore, I didn’t actually take part in Hinterland. But I’m sure there will be plenty of photographs taken to see how it and the coming restoration shape the future of St. Peter’s Seminary. After all, that’s all we now have from what came before.

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