I was arrested by the above image at the extremely interesting culture blog {feuilleton}, and learned that it shows an interior from the St. Peter's College seminary in Cardross, Scotland, a Le Corbusier homage that must have had one of the shortest half-lives of any ambitious modernist building -- only 14 years in its original function, less than 25 years in any active use. Opened and acclaimed in 1966, it was, as its Wikipedia entry tells us, functionally obsolescent upon arrival, a victim of changing practices in the Catholic Church. Like some other modernist masterpieces (Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater comes immediately to mind), its artistry was in advance of its engineering, making it difficult to maintain and prone to "water ingress." It only lasted as a seminary until 1980 (with an ever-dwindling population of seminarians), was tried unsuccessfully as a drug rehabiltation center, suffered from a bad fire, and generally began to crumble quickly away. Brian Dillon, in a piece in the Guardian this February, calls St. Peter's a "vast complex of futuristic rot" and adds:
Vandalism, graffiti and pure desuetude have turned the seminary into a cinematic ghost. It's a place...that resembles nothing so much as the desolate and sentient "zone" in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker: a place where snow falls slowly upon vacant altars, where stagnant pools are so full of rot that they look horribly alive even at the edge of winter, where a startlingly tame robin will perch on your head as you step delicately over the rubble.
There is a growing sub-culture of appeciators of modern ruins; the excellent blog Abandoned Places captures sites submitted from all over the world. Russian examples are in particular abundance, which would not have surprised Tarkovsky.
