The Herald

The most painful symbol of Scotland's relationship to its greatest buildings can be glanced at every day from the windows of commuting cars on Glasgow's Caledonia Road. There stands the blasted shell of Alexander "Greek" Thomson's church, widely considered to be one of the most original works of architecture of the Victorian era. If that is what has become of the best of the nineteenth century, what hope is there for the best of the twentieth? In the case of St Peter's seminary in Cardross, the most important post-war building in Scotland, the answer is: not much. This multi-faceted masterpiece in concrete, inspired both by Le Corbusier's monastery at La Tourette and the ancient forms of Scottish architecture, has been repeatedly mourned as it declined from a work of high modernist glory in the sixties to a near ruin in the nineties. But no amount of praise or lamentation has made much difference. Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, the architects at the firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia who designed it, have become, in their own lifetimes, the new Thomsons.