Le Corbusier in Scotland
IADMIRE the architect Le Corbusier for what he did in calming down the flamboyant styles of Europe and going for utilitarian lines. Because utilitarianism has its own particular beauty.
Take a violin — everything about its design is functional. There are no fripperies: the scroll, the f-holes, the curves of the instrument are all exactly that shape to produce the best sound. Yet it is a beautiful object, never mind its heavenly tonal qualities. Functional can be like that. I also like Le Corbusier because he once did me something of a favour. This came about through a trip I made to Firminy southwest of Lyon.
This isn’t on the main tourist trail, but guides will organize a tour so that you can see Le Corbusier’s architectural principles put to work.
The Firminy buildings represent functionalism at its best — a modernist stadium, a graceful cultural centre, and the mammoth living space that is the Unité d’Habitation. This is a futuristic, vertical village — the 20th century utopian vision of the Swiss architect.
THEN there’s the church. This is where the favour comes in. Le Corbusier’s outré Church of Saint-Pierre is an astonishing feat of engineering— for goodness sake inside it has an echo that takes eight seconds to return. I naturally took photos. Now it happened that on my return from France I was commissioned to write a feature for a Scottish publication on a new installation at a local distillery in Ireland. I had gone along, taken some snaps, filed copy.
Alert readers will already see the potential for disaster here. Yes, I sent the wrong photos. I only realised when I opened the Scottish mag a week later. Imagine my surprise to see Le Corbusier’s modernist church transposed against an Irish background and now captioned ‘the distillery’s new boiler and pot still’. But here’s the odd thing. Nobody noticed. Nobody wrote in to complain. No flood of emails from whiskey anoraks. Nothing. Reader — I kept quiet. I put it down to my belief that functionalism really does have its own singular beauty. Thank you Monsieur Le Corbusier. The architect has resurfaced in the news recently because the Archdiocese of Glasgow has just concluded the transfer of ownership of the former St Peter’s Seminary to new owners.
Currently the building is a ruin. Yet at one time it was one of the great buildings of the 20th century. It wasn’t designed by Le Corbusier, but it displays all his influences — it’s the closest to a Le Corbusier building you’ll find in Scotland. Its story is as fascinating as its design. By the 1960s the Catholic Church in Scotland had developed its own distinctive character, different from that in England, different from continental Europe.
This was because it was made up in large part by Irish immigrants, reinforced by influxes from Italy and Poland.
Post-war, the slums and tenements were being cleared, new towns being built. The Catholic Church capitalised on this. It began a church construction programme; some of these buildings — including St Peter’s Seminary —were impressive in the extreme.
An unusual trio was responsible for St Peter’s, and subsequent religious buildings.
BISHOP James Scanlan, head of the building programme, took a risk and went with two young, cutting-edge architects — Andy McMillan, a Highland Scot, and Isi Metzstein a Jew from Berlin. Metzstein had ended up in Glasgow as one of the last of the Kindertransport children.
McMillan and Metzstein knew that the Catholic Church in Scotland was keen to show it was progressive (in relative terms), but didn’t want to ape the excesses of Europe with its cathedrals festooned with rococo decoration. They accordingly drew on the stark architectural drama of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
They took their brutalist plans to Bishop Scanlan. He was silent for a while, then told the architects to give him five minutes. Whether he was consulting the great Architect in the sky, or his earthly boss, is not clear. But he came back and said, “Build it.” Today St Patrick’s Seminary is a forlorn ruin, but its brutalist lines are still clearly visible, as impressive as they were back in the 1960s. Scanlan gave McMillan and Metzstein the go ahead to build several more churches. So in Scotland in the 1960s there pertained an odd situation — a man of Irish heritage telling a Highland Protestant Scot and a Berlin Jew to go ahead and build Catholic churches.
Not the first time a Jewish person has built a Christian church, of course, but it’s impressive nonetheless.