Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were a Scottish architectural firm famous for their application of modernism in churches and universities, as well as at St Peter's Seminary in Cardross. Though founded in 1927, it is for their work in the post-war period that they are best known. The firm was wound up in 1986.

Churches

The huge construction project of new towns in Scotland relocated many people from inner city Glasgow. As a result, the number of Catholics in Glasgow collapsed: from a 69,000 in 1951 to 13,000 in 1971. This was against a rising number of Catholics in the country as a whole, reaching a peak of 15% of the population in the early 1960s. The changing demographics clearly required new provision of churches. Gillespie Kidd & Coia were nearly the only practice involved in the building of the new, radical churches.

St Mary's of Bo'ness 1962; St Joseph's, Faifley, 1964; Our Lady of Good Cousel, Dennistoun, 1965; and St Benedict's, Drumchapel, 1965 were all geometric buildings with sweeping roofs, which used new construction techniques, such as glued laminated timber. In contrast, churches including St Charles, Kelvinside, 1959; St Mary of the Angels, Falkirk, 1960; St Bride's, East Kilbride, 1963, St Patricks, Kilsyth, 1963; and Sacred Heart, Cumbernauld, 1964 were all rectangular, load-bearing brick, which were very plain on the outside, but dramatically lit on the inside.

St Peter's Seminary

Following a fire in 1946 at St Peter's Seminary in the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, a new home was needed for the semiary. Discussions began with Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1953, but the plans for a new college in Cardross were not finalised until 1961, when building began. The plan was for a new building built at Kilmahew House, which had been being used as a temporary home. The 1865 house would become professorial accommodation, and around it would wrap a main block, a convent block, a sanctuary block and a classroom block.

Determinably modernist, brutalist and owing a huge debt to Le Corbusier, the building is often considered one of the most important modernist buildings in Scotland. "The architecture of Le Corbusier translated well into Scotland in the 1960s. Although the climate of the south of France and west of Scotland could hardly be more different, Corbu's roughcast concrete style, could, in the right hands, be seen as a natural successor or complement to traditional Scottish tower houses with their rugged forms and tough materials" wrote Jonathan Glancey. Filmmaker Murray Grigor made a documentary about the building entitled "Space and Light", while Glasgow artist Toby Paterson has painted it.

By the time it was completed, in 1966, it was already out of date. The Second Vatican Council wanted priests to be trained in communities, rather than remote seminaries. Meanwhile the number of Catholics in Scotland were dropping; the numbers wishing to be priests were dropping even faster. In 1980 the seminary was closed, subsequently becoming a drug rehabilitation centre, and by the late 1980s, left empty. In 1995 a fire so badly damaged Kilmahew House that it had to be demolished. As of 2004 the building is a ruin, and attempts to convert and reuse it, or even protect it from further damage, have come to nothing.

University architecture

Having completed St Peter's, the firm gradually had fewer and fewer commissions in Scotland, and became more involved with university architecture in England. From 1971 to 1979 they worked on an extension to Wadham College in Oxford, called "a refreshing, shocking contribution to the gloomy Oxford backstreet in which it stands" by the Architects Journal.

Robinson College was their most important building of this phase, and the last major building they designed. Winning a competition in 1974 for the entirely new college, their design is almost exclusively of brick, and incorporated existing gardens dating from the 1890s and 1900s.

Bibliography

• Cardross Seminary : Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the architecture of postwar Catholicism, (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1997)

External links

• Gillespie, Kidd & Coia (http://www.c20society.org.uk/docs/casework/gkc.html) at c20society.org.uk
• Gillespie, Kidd & Coia (http://www.glasgowarchitecture.co.uk/gillespie_kidd_&_coia.htm) at glasgowarchitecture.co.uk
• St.Peter's Seminary (http://www.c20society.org.uk/docs/casework/st_peters.html) at c20society.org.uk
• St.Peter's Seminary (http://www.riskybuildings.org.uk/docs/26stpeters/index.html) at riskybuildings.org.uk
• Temple to ruined dreams (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=439212003) at The Scotsman