“The cold reality is that no one is going to save St Peter’s Seminary [in Cardross] because there are not enough voices championing Scottish modernism. It is too vast and visually unlovely for a private collector… The odds are also shortening for the Bernat Klein Studio [in the Borders] — the climate crisis will see to that.
“Like its uglier sister brutalism, modernism divides opinion. It is unforgiving and its materials (glass, concrete, steel) require constant upkeep. But its place in built environment history is crucial if we are to understand what came before and after. It was a radical new direction at a time when the UK was healing after the Second World War. Bold. Futuristic. Hopeful. Qualities sorely lacking from housebuilding today.
“Perhaps the question to be debated is not how to create a modernist masterpiece but how to save it. Or at least wonder why, in Scotland, it is being forgotten.”
[Gabriella Bennett in the Sunday Times]