Le Corbusier famously built nothing in Britain. His sole commission in this country was to design a temporary exhibition stand for the Venesta Plywood Company, to be erected at the Building Trades Exhibition in 1930. (A single photograph and drawing are all that remain of the structure.) As the decade progressed, however, his thought and practice inspired such domestic masterpieces as Wells Coates's Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead and Berthold Lubetkin's Penguin Pool at London Zoo. More vexedly, as a modest photographic annex to the Barbican's forthcoming Corbusier exhibition reminds us, it was towards Corbusian principles that postwar architects turned to solve Britain's housing crisis. The sun-drenched monument of his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, is the direct precursor to such fraught edifices of the high-rise boom as Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield and Roehampton in London - a concrete legacy that still leaks rancour in certain quarters.
Most of the postwar buildings referred to at the Barbican - itself a late flowering of the Corbusian spirit - are still in use or, like the notorious Ronan Point flat complex in Canning Town, have since been demolished. One structure, though, has had a curious half-life, and persists today as a relic of the architectural heroism of that era. A photograph in the exhibition shows St Peter's College, a Catholic seminary erected on the banks of the Clyde in the 1960s as a gleaming tribute to late Corbusier. A three-storey concrete ziggurat, almost 200ft long and flanked by silo-like side chapels, rises majestically out of the woods. In the foreground, a curved terminal wall towers elegantly above the main chapel and sanctuary; at the far end, an escape stairs in raw board-formed concrete composes a jagged coda. Seen like this, in its monochrome pomp, St Peter's is an audacious precis of everything progressive British architects once felt about the legacy of Le Corbusier.
Forty years on, St Peter's is among the sorriest remnants of Britain's brief and ambiguous romance with modernism. A half-hour train ride from Glasgow, and a 10-minute walk from the Clydeside village of Cardross, will take you deep into the sodden undergrowth of present attitudes to postwar architecture. The structure, abandoned in the early 1980s, looms as impressively as ever, but its interiors were gutted long ago and its substance has suffered decades of abuse and decay. Penetrate the main block depicted in the photograph at the Barbican, and you discover in its shadow, among the (equally magnificent) outlying buildings, a vast complex of futuristic rot - perhaps the closest Britain currently comes to the post-apocalyptic vision adumbrated by JG Ballard during the dying days of modernism. St Peter's is a ruin as much of the architectural dreams of its century as of the more localised and equally doomed optimism that brought it into being.
The hopes incarnated at Cardross were raised and dashed with astonishing speed. As Frank Arneil Walker puts it in the volume of The Buildings of Scotland devoted to Argyll and Bute, "in little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked". The new seminary complex was first mooted in the early 1950s, after fire destroyed the original St Peter's College at Bearsden and student priests were relocated to Kilmahew House, a baronial pile on the outskirts of Cardross. In 1953, the local diocese, anticipating a continued influx of seminarians and consequent pressure on the premises available, engaged the Glasgow firm Gillespie, Kidd & Coia to design a set of buildings in which to house and train more than a hundred students. As with many of the ecclesiastical projects that the firm completed in this period - there are extant churches, somewhat reminiscent of St Peter's, at Kilsyth, East Kilbride and Drumchapel - design of the seminary was entrusted to Isi Metzstein and Andrew MacMillan, two young architects entranced by the postwar buildings of Le Corbusier.
It was the Swiss architect's chapel at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, and his monastery at La Tourette, which opened four years later, that particularly inspired MacMillan and Metzstein. Traces of both buildings are everywhere at Cardross. The monumental main block takes its cue from La Tourette, though at St Peter's the bunker-like profile has been softened by stepping back successive storeys behind circulating balconies. The undercroft entrance to the college complex recalls the way that La Tourette seems to hover on its concrete pilotis; but it is the adjacent classroom building, extravagantly cantilevered above the trees, that properly echoes the soaring, aspirant qualities of the French monastery. A small concrete block, modelled after the lower storeys of the main residential and chapel building, nurses a huddle of mini-Ronchamps: a rounded common room, kitchen and refectory randomly dotted with small windows.
It is often, at St Peter's, such details that reveal the Corbusian heritage of the place. Inside the convent, curved wooden ceilings rose to embrace light from above, as beneath the concrete roof at Ronchamp. The glazed walls of the ground floor in the main building were randomly mullioned, as at La Tourette, while the fire escape is an angular twin to Le Corbusier's at Marseille. But St Peter's is (or was) not exactly a rigorous repurposing of Corbusian structures and motifs. The towering side chapels to the main building - five on each side - had their cruise-ship cowls clad so as to harmonise with the sandstone of Kilmahew House, which stood at the centre of the site. (The house, once the administrative hub of the seminary, was demolished after a fire in 1995.) The interiors to all of the buildings were generously panelled in solid wood or veneer, so that the whole seems to hark back also to the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In sum, St Peter's was both of its time architecturally and sufficiently eclectic and traditional not to startle the diocesan authorities too much. Still, students were apt to refer to it as "the spaceship".
How such an ambitious and apparently sensitive building could have failed so swiftly and comprehensively seems at first a historical conundrum. Hymned in its heyday by Country Life and specialist journals such as Concrete Quarterly - "a splendidly virile and rugged building" - it appeared to point to a solid architectural and ecclesiastical future. Gillespie, Kidd & Coia received an award for the building from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1967. But in the same year, the college magazine recorded jammed windows, door handles that fell off, the flooding of the chapel and a series of ominous creaks from the huge beams that soared above the sanctuary. The decline of St Peter's cannot be traced solely to such architectural teething troubles. The college, in truth, was obsolete at the moment it opened; conceived before the liturgical and educational innovations of the Second Vatican Council had been put into practice, the complex was wedded to a semi-monastic ideal that soon expired. Recruitment to the priesthood waned in the 1970s, but the church had already elected to educate its seminarians in urban communities, not sequestered in the woods, and had committed itself to a more inclusive liturgical layout. St Peter's, for all its modernity, was in a sense already a ruin.
Institutional rot had set in by the mid-1970s; the college reached little over half its quota of students, and by the end of the decade they numbered only in the 20s. Expensive maintenance of the buildings no longer seemed worthwhile to church authorities, and in 1980 the seminary was closed. A brief period as a drug rehabilitation centre was followed by three decades of episcopal inertia and deep confusion, in the public and private sector, about how the buildings might be put to use again. Schemes to turn St Peter's into a police training centre, a hotel or a stabilised ruin surrounded by executive housing all came to nothing. The idiosyncrasies of the building - the tiny cells, the complex liturgical machinery of the sanctuary - seemed to preclude an alternative use. As owners and authorities dithered, the buildings were ransacked, windows smashed, wood burned. The site's A-listing by Historic Scotland in 1992, and its placement on the World Monuments Fund's list of buildings at risk in 2007, may have highlighted its peril but did little to slow the destruction.
In its pristine state, St Peter's was well documented. The BBC filmed it first in 1966, and again in 1967 for a documentary called The Making of a Priest. But the most ambitious cinematic record of the place is Murray Grigor's Space and Light, made in 1972. In a scant 20 minutes, Grigor thoroughly explores the structure of the college, tracking its students from their cells on the upper floors of the main building, along polished corridors and down to the glass-sided refectory and the skylit chapel with its massive granite altar. In a skilful sequence, the film demonstrates the spiralling of space upwards from the vestry and along a concrete sanctuary ramp, the camera following a priest as he emerges into the chapel proper, the roof beams radiating above him as they catch the light.
Earlier this month, I accompanied Grigor - who had secured a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council, the funder of his original film - as he returned to St Peter's intent on remaking Space and Light more or less shot for shot. (More or less, because certain images are irretrievable, whole floors having disintegrated.) With the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Seamus McGarvey behind the camera and the 1972 film cued on his laptop, Grigor essayed a melancholy filmic archaeology, an eerie record of just how much of St Peter's has gone since its closure. Vandalism, graffiti and pure desuetude have turned the seminary into a cinematic ghost. It's a place, as Grigor's film crew noted more than once, that resembles nothing so much as the desolate and sentient "zone" in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker: a place where snow falls slowly upon vacant altars, where stagnant pools are so full of rot that they look horribly alive even at the edge of winter, where a startlingly tame robin will perch on your head as you step delicately over the rubble.
It's easy, in other words, to be seduced by the formerly sacred atmosphere of St Peter's, now reduced to a decidedly profane sort of picturesque. (The graffiti is a palimpsest of mid-1990s rave-culture motifs, the odd ambitiously garish tag and a stencilled quotation from Herbert Read concerning the advent of a modernist "machine age", which has itself recently been sprayed over.) The building's second coming as a cherished wreck - much photographed by connoisseurs of 20th-century ruins: a Flickr search will yield hundreds of images - may not, however, constitute its final incarnation. In the months before Grigor returned to the derelict precincts of St Peter's, discussions were under way between the diocese and Urban Splash, with a view to restoring the buildings for residential and community use.
There is still, then, despite its advanced state of decay, a kind of hope embodied in the spalled concrete, shattered glass and charred wood of St Peter's. At the summit of the spiral staircase that is tucked into the tightest curve of the high sanctuary wall, you can still catch slitted glimpses of the altar below, the classroom and convent beyond, the surrounding woodland and the Clyde in the distance. The building deserves to become an active part of this landscape again. Le Corbusier claimed that at La Tourette the essential life of the monastery lay within, in prayer, meditation and the liturgy; it was not a building that spoke outwardly of itself. For all its architectural audacity, St Peter's has something of this turning from the world. But that does not mean that it is not a building for which, now, one ought to speak up, if perhaps for the last time.
• Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2, from 19 February to 24 May. Details: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk Screening venues for the two versions of Murray Grigor's Space and Light will be announced later this year.
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