To Have and To Hold

About the Book: 

Almost thirty years have passed since St Peter’s Seminary, designed by Gillespie,
Kidd & Coia and located on the Kilmahew estate between the villages of Renton
and Cardross in West Scotland, lost its function and was left to the elements. The
juxtaposition of an infamous twentieth-century ruin, noted as Scotland’s greatest
modernist building, sited within a ‘romantic’ Victorian designed landscape has
resulted in a tension that is both exciting and thought-provoking.

For the past two and a half years Glasgow-based public art agency NVA have been
working with a number of partners to develop a radical plan for the Kilmahew
woodland including the former seminary. In 2010 a group of academics, artists,
writers, architects and landscape architects gathered in Venice, during the
Architecture Biennale, to discuss the historical context and the future potential for
the site and its buildings.

This book brings together a discursive set of texts and raises questions about how
we deal with history and heritage, conservation and preservation, ownership and
decision-making around contested sites in the twenty-first century.