An appeal has been launched to save a derelict building hidden in an overgrown wood in Scotland that is described as one of the greatest modernist buildings in Europe.
With its long, clean lines covered by graffiti and its concrete greyed with rainwater, St Peter's Seminary has lain in a state of ruin since it was abandoned by the Catholic church in 1980.
The vast, crumbling building is accessible only by foot and, despite a number of restoration proposals over recent decades, it has been left to decay and to the vandals.
It has been dubbed "Scotland's shame" and "Scotland's creepiest building", yet a plan to turn the ruin into a hotel in 2007 was dropped because of the cost of restoration.
Foreign architecture students who make pilgrimages to see St Peter's have often been unable to locate it, lost as it is inside the 140-acre Kilmahew Forest, near the small town of Cardross, about 25 miles outside Glasgow, whose great architectural scion was Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
St Peter's was opened in 1966, a triumph of post-war architecture and stunningly imaginative design.
But it was practically obsolete by the time it was completed, as the Catholic church had decreed in 1965 that its trainee priests should be schooled not in isolated rural havens like St Peter's, but inside the urban churches of Europe, close to those they would later serve.
As a result the seminary was never fully occupied.
In 1980, it briefly became a drug rehabilitation centre before its closure later that year.
The Catholic church was at the forefront of modernist building works in Scotland at the time, commissioning several churches of bold radical design across the country.
Many were designed by Isi Metzstein, known as Britain's answer to Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andy McMillan, who then ran the Scottish firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, which designed St Peter's.
The seminary is now the subject of a new book: To Have and To Hold, Future of a Contested Landscape. Funded by the Scottish government and Creative Scotland, the book is the first step in an ambitious £10 million project to save St Peter's, turn the surrounding area into a public space and establish a new arts college there.
"It's not a lot of money for a project like this. There is a lot of positivity, but we are very aware we are attempting to do what we want to do in the middle of the worst recession in however long," said Angus Farquhar, the creative director of Nacionale Vitae Activa, a Scottish arts charity which has acquired the site, which is also home to a Victorian estate within its ancient woodlands which the seminary was designed to sit against.
"But we won't be trying a complete restoration. This isn't like the National Trust approach, where everything will be restored to its original state. This is more an intent to preserve and re-use a modern ruin. St Peter's was designed with 107 cell bedrooms for trainee priests. As we have seen with previous commercial projects, that doesn't translate into a hotel or flats."
The idea was to clean up St Peter's, seal it from the elements and use it as a public arts space, treating it "as one would a 19th-century castle", he said.
"As a skeletal form it is very powerful. There is this great sweeping form with each cell making a floating concrete plinth. The use of light is exquisite. The chapel in particular uses light and shadow and shape, where light is filtered down across these huge beams above the altar and across this curved linear wall."
"It's such a symbol of that period of post-war regeneration, it seems logical to use the site as living heritage for artists and the public to come into this amazing landscape, for concerts and theatre groups. It will be something very special for Scotland."
In 2008 St Peter's was listed on the World Monuments Fund's list of 100 most endangered sites, but Farquhar hopes that the £10m fund, to be raised over the next two years, will enable restoration work to begin by 2013.