St Peter's College, Cardross

St Peter's College, Cardross is a seminary designed by I Metzstein, J Cowell and A MacMillan of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia and completed in 1966. It was commissioned in 1958 by the Archbishop of Glasgow and originally consisted of linked buildings arranged around the now-demolished Kilmahew House.

The complex employed innovative concrete slab and column construction throughout, with brown pebble facings to precast concrete slab cladding. The main block measures 184 by 84 feet and rises four storeys over a partly raised basement. Clustered concrete columns support a basement with sunken undercroft. The upper floors form a stepped, ziggurat-like elevation created by superimposed cantilevers, expressing a pyramid arrangement of bedroom and study spaces. The interior features a non-structural vaulted ceiling of metal lath and plaster, with upper storeys vaulted and stepped-back to reflect the external elevation. Interior access balconies at each level open to a central space. Windows were originally fitted with pine panelling and random-spaced timber mullions, though most are now gone.

The chapel occupies the south end and is flanked by silo-like side chapels with half-dome tops and top-lighting. The chapel itself is top-lit at the liturgical east end, with an altar connected by a ramp descending behind it to a sacristy and lower chapels. The hall and staircase area sits between the chapel and refectory at the north end. An in-situ reinforced concrete escape stair to the north end cantilevers from a reinforced concrete chimney.

The lecture theatre and library block adjoins at right angles, measuring two storeys over a raised basement. The basement formerly housed library and recreational rooms accessed through perimeter precast concrete columns. The upper storey was formerly a glazed classroom. The top storey, supported on four large internal columns, features beams carrying cantilevered projections extending up to 40 feet at both ends, with in-situ concrete wall board-marked in a diagonal herring-bone pattern. This floor originally housed top-lit lecture theatres.

A single-storey service and kitchen wing, now partly demolished, connected the main block to Kilmahew House. It was harled with small windows irregularly placed, now blocked.

A two-storey convent wing formerly adjoined Kilmahew House to the north, consisting of a cluster of small rooms, most with curved walls, harled at ground level with small windows partly set beneath a cantilevered almost rectangular-plan upper storey. The upper storey employed concrete slab and column construction with brown-pebble facings to precast concrete slab cladding.

The building was influenced by the architecture of Le Corbusier, particularly his monastery of La Tourette, and reinterpreted the traditional monastic plan in modern terms through innovative planning and interrelated spaces expressed externally through changes of form and materials. The complex achieved sculptural quality through technical virtuosity. It received the prestigious RIBA Architecture award in 1967 and was recognised as one of the finest modern buildings of its time. Kilmahew House was demolished in 1995 following fire damage. The seminary is now redundant and has been systematically vandalised, reduced to a ruinous skeleton.