Doors Open Day at St Peter’s, Cardross, United Kingdom – 23 and 24 September 2017 – Festival of Architecture 2017

Hinterland is a performance by Glasgow-based arts organization NVA, set in the ruins of St. Peter’s Seminary of Cardross, Scotland.

The performance has opened last year’s Festival of Architecture and will be on again this September (23 and 24) as an event in this year edition’s programme.

Combining moving light installations and projection with a choral soundscape by composer Rory Boyle, light and sound bring out the dramaturgical potential of this Modernist architecture and its austere interiors creating a dazzling scenography.

The Architecture

The modernist building, completed in 1966, fulfilled its original function as a training college for Catholic priests for only thirteen years. Designed in their early years by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of the Glasgow based architectural practice Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the building, which is inspired both by Le Corbusier and Mackintosh, is considered “resolutely experimental, ambitious, capricious, poetic and challenging.”

Reported as to be difficult to live in during winters in all its neo-monastic austerity due to leaks and faulty heating, the building would offer its delights on summer’s days, when sunlight would refract through the innovative ziggurat rooflight and floating glulam beams above the altar. Light and shadow would alternate in an ever-changing dance and the geometric shapes move slowly across the walls and floor of the chapel.

⇒ See the building’s full story on BBC – ARTS