Publication Account

Date 1997

Event ID 1019426

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1019426

Rhetorical culmination of the romantic, 'form-giving' tendency in Scottish Modernism, and of the sectional planning formula for educational institutions developed by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. A seminary for training of a hundred student priests, set on an abrupt wooded bluff, adjacent to an exisiting Baronial house by John Burnet Senior. On the outside, studiedly rough concrete surfaces, block geometry, and dramatic cantilevering over the trees; inside, spectacularly flowing spaces intended to express the unity of the community's activities, through the enfolding of chapel and refectory by stepped ranges of study bedrooms. Following several years of dereliction and vandalism, the College is now stripped to a tree-enveloped skeleton. In 1993, at the request of DOCOMOMO's Scottish working-party, Historic Scotland raise the college's list status to Category 'A' (Fig. 4.42).

Information from 'Rebuilding Scotland: The Postwar Vision, 1945-75', (1997).