Sanctuary

This fictional work about the construction and decay of a late modernist building can also be read as an essay on our contemporary unease with modernism in general. Author Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, based it on research into St. Peter's Seminary, a college complex commissioned by the Catholic Church in the 1950s, completed in 1968, and abandoned by 1980. On the outskirts of Glasgow - itself a city with a vexed relationship to Le Corbusier-esque modernism - the building is rich with histories: of its architects, its residing student priests, the drug addicts it once housed and treated, and the local teenagers for whom it is a kind of Gothic recreation center. This book takes the material remains of modernism and treats them from a literary point of view.