St Paul's Roman Catholic Church, Warout Road, Glenrothes

St Paul's Roman Catholic Church is a flat-roofed, lectern-shaped building designed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and built between 1956 and 1958. It stands on Warout Road in Glenrothes, built in response to the town's designation as a New Town in 1948 and the anticipated influx of Catholic miners from western Scotland.

The church's design is simplified and expressionist in style, executed in white painted brick. The west elevation features an advanced, part-coloured wall of glass and timber with irregularly disposed vertical and horizontal panes, behind which lies a flat roof (recently altered to sloping) leading to a glazed chancel wall. A part-glazed door in a projecting porch to the right forms a link with the adjoining presbytery. The east elevation, originally symmetrical, comprises a broad tower-like chancel at the centre beneath a rising slate roof surmounted by a cross, with lower flanking walls and an adjoining extension to the left featuring a deep-set door and a row of small windows. The north elevation presents a blank wall with a wrought-iron sign. Cast-iron downpipes and decorative rainwater hoppers serve the building.

The interior is top-lit with the chancel receiving particular emphasis through top lighting. It contains a 12-foot-high metal altar cross with symbols of the passion, St Joseph, the Virgin Mary and a pieta, created by sculptor Benno Schotz in 1957. A Madonna for the Lady Altar to the southwest was also made by Schotz in 1960. Carved figures of St Paul and the Stations of the Cross were executed by Harry Bain. The font is now positioned to the southeast, with a confessional to the west. A hall to the south incorporates sliding partition walls. The foundation stone was laid by Reverend Gordon Joseph Grey on 23 June 1957, and the church opened on 30 June 1958.

The presbytery adjoins to the southwest as a single-storey structure, originally of irregular U-plan with a flat roof and later additions forming a courtyard plan. The north and west elevations feature asymmetrical fenestration with a modern door, bipartite windows and a continuous narrow glazed strip below the wallhead. Plate glass glazing and plain bargeboarding characterise the design. Coped brick boundary walls enclose the site.

The church was the first designed by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan for Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. Reginald Fairlie had been the initial choice of architect, but his plans were rejected by the Diocese. The building was achieved on a limited budget of approximately £20,000 for both church and presbytery. A projected circular-plan church hall was never built. The design's guiding principle, as articulated by Metzstein, emphasizes light, simplified construction methods and manipulated top lighting rather than side windows, with emphasis on grouping people near and around the altar. The walls are splayed to represent the spreading of the Gospel to the world, with the altar originally placed against the east wall in accordance with liturgical renewal principles of the Catholic Church, though it was relocated away from the wall following directives of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1970s.

St Paul's represents a seminal example of modern church architecture and one of Scotland's most significant post-war churches, being the first to break with the traditional rectangular layout. The building remains in use as a place of worship.