St. Peter's Seminary, Cardross

I'll be using these photos of St. Peter's Seminary in Cardross as the basis of my Advanced Visual Creativity Personal Project, in conjunction with sketchwork and collage ideas. My aim is to use the photography to depict St. Peter's as it appears now, and the sketchwork to depict my interpretation of what it looked like before it descended into its current ruinous state. I then plan to throw together a large collage of images interspersing the two styles of artwork.

Now, to give you some bumph about St. Peter's:

• Despite it's apparent ruinous, collapsing state, it is actually one of the few modern Category A-listed buildings in West Central Scotland.

• Designed by world renowned architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, with one eye very firmly on the works of Le Corbusier.

• Has been described by various sources as "a modern building of world significance" and "the finest example of post-modern brutalist architecture in the United Kingdom".

• Was included on the World Monument Fund's '100 Most Endangered Sites' list in both 2007 and 2008.

The building was originally intended to be used as a training college for Catholic priests, but just as it was being completed, the practice of teaching priests in seclusion from their eventual congregations was beginning to lose sway within the Catholic Chuch in Scotland, and as such, the building never came close to achieving full occupancy after it's official opening in 1966. From the outset, the building was riddled with structural and maintenace problems, mostly caused by substandard engineering and cost cutting during the construction process. It closed as a Seminary in 1980, and was used for a while as a drug treatment and rehabilitation centre, but the maintenance and engineering problems it had experienced earlier in its existence continued to plague the building, and as such, it had been completely vacated, stripped and left to the elements by the early 1990s.