The novelist Alice Thomas Ellis once asserted that if you fetch up in a town you haven’t been to before and want to find the Catholic church, look for the most ugly building you can find and that will almost certainly be it.
The Catholic author’s ire at what she perceived to be the iniquities of the postwar ecclesiastical Modernism might have been directed at Andy MacMillan, who along with his architectural partner Isi Metzstein, sought to “strip out the rubbish” of decorative traditional churches. He wrestled the building form into the 20th century by designing brutalist concrete and modernist red brick exteriors and minimalist interiors that won great acclaim.
The maverick Glaswegian, who himself was a lapsed Protestant, revelled in such iconoclasm. He was assisted by the Roman Catholic Church’s profound liturgical modernisation in the early 1960s which culminated in the Second Vatican Council and needed bold architectural statements to herald the spirit of the age.
MacMillan designed many churches in Scotland while working with Metzstein at the practice Gillespie, Kidd and Coia and his tour de force St Peter’s College seminary on the banks of the Clyde in Cardross, consecrated in 1966, has been called Scotland’s most important piece of postwar architecture. The concrete ziggurat of continuous arches weaved a powerful narrative. Celebrants of a mass would process from the sacristy to the top-lit main chapel along a curved ramp flanked by silo-like side chapels whose thick concrete was punctured with randomly shaped windows.
Vatican II ultimately proved to be the undoing of the seminary as one of the directions of the council was that seminarians should be trained for the priesthood among the faithful in parishes and not banished to remote countryside locations. On top of that the steady stream of young men deciding to become priests slowed to a trickle. By 1979 there were just 21 seminarians training in a facility built for 100. The seminary was closed in 1980 and quickly became an intriguing ruin in surrounding woodlands, beloved of truanting children who used its walls as a canvas for graffiti. MacMillan was devastated to see how his masterpiece was allowed to crumble: “It’s terrible to live in a culture that can allow a building like that to be treated that way,” he bemoaned.
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St Peter’s A-listing in 1992 did little to stop the decline. A £7.5 million plan to restore part of the seminary, including the chapel, and maintain the rest a ruin to visit, in the same way that tourists visit medieval monasteries, was given a boost with a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in December 2013. MacMillan was thrilled by the plans.
Andrew MacMillan was born prematurely in 1928 in a Glasgow tenement. He was not expected to survive but he did after his unemployed father ingeniously devised a home-made incubator. As an apprentice at Glasgow Corporation his talent for draughtsmanship was noticed and he was encouraged to study architecture. While lining up to enrol for night courses at the Glasgow School of Art, where the celebrated architect of the school Charles Rennie Mackintosh had queued for night classes some 50 years before, MacMillan struck up a friendship with Isi Metzstein. The pair later teamed up in 1954 at the practice Gillespie, Kidd and Coia. Here MacMillan took the lead with the Jewish atheist Metzstein on designs for Catholic churches; the commissions rolled in as their devout Catholic boss Jack Coia cut deals with Glasgow archdiocese.
Inspired by the Swiss great Le Corbusier, who created the 1955 sculptural white concrete chapel at Ronchamp, Macmillan and Metzstein designed St Paul’s, Glenrothes (1957), which has been described as the first modern church in Britain. St Bride’s in East Kilbride (1964) was a particular favourite of MacMillan’s and the red-brick monolith became one of the most recognisable buildings of Scotland’s first New Town.
MacMillan’s and Metzstein’s boldness never dimmed as they designed nearly 20 churches together over the following decades. They would work in silence on the same drawing without needing to say a word to each other. The intense concentration would be broken by a gag, and Metzstein often had MacMillan in stitches of laughter as the “master of the Jewish one-liner”.
As their reputation spread, MacMillan and Metzstein worked on bigger projects such as the library at Wadham College, Oxford and Robinson College, Cambridge. By this stage, MacMillan was busy creating his other great legacy as the charismatic head of school at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art from 1973 to 1994. Teaching amid the beautiful timber interiors by the Art Nouveau dandy, MacMillan turned “the Mac” into a world-class school.
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MacMillan argued that Georgian/Victorian street patterns, squares and gardens produced a more humane environment when cities in the UK were being indiscriminately demolished under the banner of a utopian future. This revised view of urbanism and placemaking is become an accepted creed. He was appointed OBE in 1992.
As a straight-talking Glaswegian with an impish sense of humour, MacMillan was a rigorous teacher who could reduce his students to tears in tutorials, but he would generously work overtime to help them and cared about them deeply. One student once stood in awe when he espied MacMillan in a Glasgow bar laughing over a whisky with the comedian Billy Connolly before returning to teach in the afternoon.
After his retirement, MacMillan remained a prominent and much-loved figure on the Scottish architecture scene, often chairing design competitions. He was a member of the panel that chose the late Enric Miralles’s controversial design for the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood. When the building was vilified in Edinburgh for being architecturally underwhelming and hugely over budget, the Glaswegian turned on the building’s critics the in city with typical brio.
A few months before his death he revisited many of the Scottish churches he had designed on a tour with the Glasgow School of Art choir, which was testing out the acoustics in each church as research for an architecture student’s dissertation. As the singers began, MacMillan looked deeply moved and his wife Angela (who survives him along with their four children: Angela, a buyer and product designer, Siobhan, who works in community education, Fiona, an architect, and Fred who works in the film industry) squeezed his arm. Seemingly about to burst into tears he looked at the ceiling. When asked if he was about to well up, he replied: “Oh not at all. I was actually just wondering what bloody idiot thought those light fittings were a good idea.”
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He still taught at “the Mac” at the time of his death and entertained with his fund of stories on architectural greats he had met, such as James Stirling, Daniel Libeskind and the Smithsons. Returning to the school after the recent fire that destroyed the library, he gazed on the blackened exposed structure and remarked that he felt enlightened as for so many years he had misunderstood Mackintosh’s design.
He died after collapsing while in his element judging projects for the Royal Institute of Architects in Scotland’s annual awards.
Andy MacMillan, OBE, architect, was born on December 11, 1928. He died after a cerebral haemorrhage on August 16, 2014, aged 85