CARDROSS.- Designed by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan (Gillespie Kidd & Coia) and winner of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1969, the world famous St Peter's seminary set in the former Kilmahew estate has been abandoned for over 25 years. Plans are now underway to resuscitate this architectural icon and its surrounding landscape to create a unique art, heritage and educational resource in the west of Scotland. Led by Glasgow‐based public art charity NVA, the proposals have garnered high level political and financial support and plans are progressing well. The project has over £5 million of private and public investment in place to support the capital works and its first five year activity programme.
NVA announced the appointment of a dynamic design team partnership that will take forward the next steps in realising these ambitious proposals. Highly respected London based architects Avanti Architects, and Glasgow based contemporary practices ERZ Landscape Architects and NORD Architecture all have experience and expertise in the innovative reclamation of abandoned buildings and landscapes. The collective actions will bring Kilmahew/St Peter’s back to fruition will take many years, but every step has value in the site’s transformation from its current state of ruinous abandonment.
Notably different from many standard redevelopments, the plans for Kilmahew/St Peter's take the current state of the buildings and grounds as inspiration, finding value in the unmediated changes that have emerged over the last decades. Based on a model of combining consolidation and partial restoration with reclamation and new design, there will be no attempt to freeze time, and no final conclusion in this approach: the intention is to capture a raw sense of otherness, excitement and revelation.
The landscape regenerative works will be sequential, firstly seeing the eradication of the invasive rhododendron ponticum from the landscape this winter and the replanting of native woodland in the spring. The remediation of the semi‐ancient woodland will encourage native flora to re‐establish in the understory and allow many signature trees to recover after decades of neglect.
Site clearance works to remove dangerous wind‐borne asbestos from the buildings will begin early in 2015. This vital work will make the site safe for public access and enable NVA to produce an inaugural illuminated landscape event in spring 2016. The site will formally open to the public in summer 2017, 50 years after the foundation stone was first laid. The new designs will provide a flexible, 600 capacity, performing arts venue, create informal indoor and outdoor teaching spaces across the 144 acre site and provide over four kilometers of accessible woodland paths. The interpretation plans will include an innovative heritage exhibition and the Victorian Walled garden will host a locally led productive garden.
The first five summers will see Kilmahew/St Peter’s become the inspirational home of the next generation of artists and creative practitioners, teachers and audiences. Promoting a lively programme of events and exhibitions, the aim is to demonstrate how a public space can advance social change. It is the creative team’s singular integration of the built and natural environment that will generate a special form of modified rural landscape for the 21st century. Landscapes can be read or interpreted in many ways: NVA intends to progressively reveal the site history, disinter things that are relevant to its current evolution and then share them in imaginative ways.
“NVA’s plans represent an unheralded form of regeneration; one that accepts loss and ruination as part of the site history. Our plans offer a singular and dramatic set of spaces to release new uses and new ways of framing human activity. We make no separation between the natural landscape and the buildings; both have different layers within the overarching narrative and are the places that we draw from. So much of our learning, from childhood onwards takes place indoors in dull, stifling environments. So why not spend time somewhere that feels like a day off from your ordinary life?” ---Angus Farquhar, Creative Director of NVA
“The former seminary at St Peter’s is one of Scotland’s most important modern 20th century buildings. This project would at last see the buildings and their wonderful landscape setting conserved and enhanced for the benefit of a wider community.” ---Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs, Scottish Government
“Without the courage to intervene the one masterpiece of late 20th century Modernism in these islands was sinking into an irreversible death. If anyone can reverse the lamentable neglect of the past decades it’s surely NVA, whose indefatigable resolve I have admired in bringing so many seemingly impossible ambitious projects to life. The challenge for the young secular architects Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan was how to translate the ecclesiastical traditions of a thousand years into a modern language: their success in achieving this fusion in their own masterpiece is surely worthy of preservation. ---Murray Grigor, Film-maker
