Abandoned and decaying buildings are part of the modern landscape, so should we rebuild them or let them be, asks Jonathan Glancey in a BBC post from 2015.
Jonathan Glancey, for the BBC, writes:
Not long before he died last year at the age of 85, Professor Andy MacMillan took me on a tour of what must surely be the greatest modern building in Scotland. This is St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, set in the overgrown grounds of the Victorian Kilmahew Estate on the edge of Glasgow. How we scrambled through improbably tall stinging nettles and bleached out rhododendron bushes to reach this masterpiece of 1960s concrete modernism.
Stepping gingerly through its ruined yet still numinous empty spaces, we talked about the ideas and ideals behind this mesmerising religious complex. And then the normally sunny MacMillan broke down in tears. This, after all, was the Scottish architect’s masterpiece – designed with his long-standing colleague Isi Metzstein – and, though the erudite and entertaining pair had built many new modern Roman Catholic churches, St Peter’s seminary was very special indeed.
Designed in a style that somehow fused the late work of Le Corbusier with Scottish baronial castles, it seemed both controversial and somehow right. Although the climate could hardly be more different, the roughcast concrete style of Le Corbusier’s ecclesiastical buildings of the 1950s could be seen, in MacMillan and Metzstein’s imaginations, as complementary to the rugged forms and materials of Scottish tower houses and castles.
And, yet, less than 15 years after this ambitious design was completed, the Catholic Church abandoned it. From now on, priests would be trained in parishes rather than apart in remote seminaries. This was a sad day for the architects if not for the Church, for although a wonderful thing to behold, St Peter’s suffered from all too many leaks and other faults: its construction was not up to its architectural ambition.
Since then the former seminary has been a drugs rehabilitation centre, a place for illicit trysts and parties, and now – after discussions that have gone on for some years – a public arts centre. The ruins of St Peter’s are certainly artistic….
Restoration drama
No one is likely to restore St Peter’s to the condition it was in its brief heyday. Not only would this be inordinately challenging and expensive, but also no one –least of all the Catholic Church – wants a 1960s concrete seminary here. Although artists may colonise it, St Peter’s future may well be that of a ruin, shored up to be safe, but no more or less than that.
In 1987 I visited the House of the Communist Party of Bulgaria on a trip organised by the Union of International Architects. The Union’s president was Georgi Stoilov, the former communist guerrilla who fought the Nazis, former mayor of Sofia and acclaimed architect. The House had opened in 1980. Situated on the top of Mount Buzludzha in the heart of a sweeping national park, this extraordinarily remote building came as complete surprise. It takes the form of a huge upturned concrete bowl, or flying saucer, accompanied by a splayed 107m (351 ft) tower…..
Behind its imposing facade adorned with communist slogans carved into the concrete – “On your feet, despised comrades/On your feet, you slaves of labour’ – was a colossal, top-lit domed chamber surrounded by colourful murals depicting communist heroes. A very long way from Sofia – a long way from anywhere – it was not exactly surprising that when Bulgaria’s communist regime fell in 1989, the building lost both its purpose and its soul…..
Other despised regimes produced even more ambitious 20th Century monuments than Bulgaria’s Communist Party. What to do with their concrete carcasses and stone shells?…
‘Ghost towns’
Meanwhile, at Prora on the island of Rügen on Germany’s Baltic coast, a colossal Nazi holiday estate marching along the sands – built by the state-owned leisure organisation KdF (Strength through Joy) in 1938-9 to the designs of Clemens Klotz – is being converted, into new holiday homes. Scale aside, there is nothing overtly totalitarian about Klotz’s design and so it has passed on – through years of either neglect or as army barracks – to a new generation of beach lovers with little of the overbearing associations of either Albert Speer’s Nuremberg stadium or, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Georgi Stoilov’s House of the Communist Party…..
There is, though, a city in the world’s richest country that can count more modern ruins than any other. This is Detroit, where several areas of the officially bankrupt city – once so dependent on the automobile industry – resemble scenes from disaster movies. There are said to be 40,000 abandoned buildings here. Detroit, however, is unlikely to take a leaf from Pyramiden’s book. This is the former Soviet coal town off the Norwegian coast that, complete yet abandoned since 1998, has now opened a hotel for fans of Soviet “ghost towns”.
Ruins do indeed hold an enduring appeal as they have done for tourists since they became fashionable in the late 18th Century. It is not always easy, sane or even right to rebuild ruined buildings, much as we are tempted to do so whether for art, nostalgia or economic gain. For some, like St Peter’s Cardross, their past – cracks and all – is, perhaps, and despite the tears, their future.
