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Andy MacMillan (left) and Isi Metzstein with their model of Robinson College, Cambridge Photo: Chris James/Epicscotland

Professor Andy MacMillan, the Scottish architect, who has died aged 85, was, with Isi Metzstein, a member of one of the most influential architectural partnerships in Britain, working in the style of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright; however, their most famous work, St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, Dunbartonshire, was once described as the place “where Modernism crawled up a hill to die”.

MacMillan and Metzstein worked together at the Glasgow firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, and later taught at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. In the 1950s they collaborated on the St Paul’s project at Glenrothes, Scotland’s second post-war New Town. Later they designed the library at Wadham College, Oxford; the halls of residence at the University of Hull; and the red-brick Robinson College at Cambridge, which in 1983 received an award for architectural excellence from the Royal Institute of British Architecture and in 2008 appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s top five “Most Inspiring Buildings in Britain”.

^{Andy MacMillan (KIERAN DODDS)}

But St Peter’s Seminary, a three-storey concrete ziggurat on the banks of the Clyde, inspired by Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp and his monastery at La Tourette, was considered their masterpiece. Completed in 1966, it was designed with a sympathetic understanding of the ritualised nature of seminary life that was perhaps surprising in a lapsed Protestant (MacMillan) and a Jewish atheist (Metzstein).

Each of the activities that made up the trainee priest’s day was given its own setting — from a glass-sided refectory to an airy sky-lit chapel with a vast granite altar — providing an environment in which the choreography of Roman Catholic ritual could be performed in spiritually uplifting space and light.

The seminary won acclaim even from such traditionalist journals as Country Life for its design and fine workmanship (the interiors were panelled in solid wood, echoing the style of Charles Rennie Macintosh). It was voted Scotland’s best modern building by the architecture magazine Prospect, and in 1967 it won Gillespie, Kidd & Coia an award from RIBA. It was also one of only 42 post-war buildings in Scotland to be Grade A listed.

^{The outside of St Peter’s Seminary when it was first built}

It also, however, attracted fierce criticism, which grew in volume as reports appeared of ill-fitting windows, door handles falling off, the chapel flooding and ominous creaks emanating from the beams that soared above the sanctuary.

Ultimately, though, it was the Second Vatican Council’s decision to train priests in local communities rather than at seminaries that proved its undoing. After just 14 years the seminary shut down, in 1980, and the building was subsequently abandoned to the elements and the vandals. Within a few years it was reduced to a graffiti-covered skeleton, named as one of the world’s most endangered sites by the World Monument Fund.

As Frank Arneil Walker put it in The Buildings of Scotland, “in little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked”. MacMillan’s verdict was: “It’s terrible to live in a culture that can allow a building like that to be treated that way.”

Despite a number of proposals for reuse or renovation of the building, its future remains in doubt.

^{The interior of the abandoned St Peter’s Seminary in Cadross (ALAMY)}

Andrew MacMillan was born prematurely on December 11 1928 in a tenement in the Maryhill district of Glasgow. His father, an unemployed railway clerk, improvised an incubator for his son, without which he probably would not have survived infancy.

At North Kelvinside Secondary School, MacMillan proved an able all-rounder and was entered for the “corporation exam” for an apprenticeship with Glasgow Corporation (now Glasgow City Council). He passed, and was interviewed by the chief architect and the chief surveyor. “The surveyor told me what a terrible job surveying is, so I chose architecture,” he recalled.

During his apprenticeship he took evening classes at Glasgow School of Art, where he met Isi Metzstein, then working as an apprentice at Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, one of Britain’s most respected architectural practices.

MacMillan worked for the corporation for seven years, and by the age of 20 was running his own projects: “I had five buildings for the corporation and 15 shopping centres. I worked on housing that varied from a prefabricated stone house to bog-standard tenements.”

He then spent two years with East Kilbride new town, but became increasingly frustrated by local government bureaucracy. In 1954, when Metzstein mentioned that there was a vacancy at Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, MacMillan jumped at the chance.

The practice had been founded in the 19th century, but from the 1930s its principal client had been the local Roman Catholic archdiocese. It had been built up by the firm’s partner Jack Coia, a devout Catholic who, before the arrival of his young protégés, designed decent but unadventurous churches along traditional lines.

Like many young architects of their generation, MacMillan and Metzstein were passionate converts to Modernism; and from 1957, when they effectively assumed creative control of the practice’s output, they began to produce an extraordinary string of Modernist buildings

Their first project, St Paul’s, Glenrothes, completed in 1957, was described as “the first modern church in Britain”. They went on to build 17 churches and chapels throughout central Scotland, following in the wake of new town development and urban housing schemes, culminating with the completion of the church of St Columba in East Kilbride in 1979. There were also the college buildings in Oxford and Cambridge, schools in Glasgow and Cumbernauld, and a maternity hospital in Bellshill.

But the churches were what they were known for. As Metzstein once explained, their aim was to “strip out the rubbish”, doing away with aisles, naves, columns and other gothic paraphernalia. Luckily the Church, itself undergoing a period of modernisation, seemed to like what they came up with.

^{Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein at one of their buildings, St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Kilsyth (KIERAN DODDS)}

MacMillan became a partner of the firm in 1966 and served as Professor of Architecture at Glasgow University and head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture from 1973 to 1994. His teaching at the school with Metzstein, who died in 2012, was credited with making it one of the best architectural training establishments in the world.

In his later years MacMillan served on architectural judging panels and as a government adviser. He was a member of the Scottish Arts Council from 1978 to 1982, and a member of the panel that chose Enric Miralles’s design for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh — a project that brought criticism from locals not only for its appearance (like “upturned boats”) but also for its spiralling cost.

In 2001 MacMillan caused a furore when he lashed out at those citizens of Edinburgh who did not appreciate the finer points of the building, declaring them introspective, ignorant, and “not cultured the way that Glasgow hooligans are cultured”.

“What’s the highlight of an Edinburgh businessman’s life?” he inquired sarcastically. “He gets to be made a member of the Royal Company of Archers. He gets to wear a funny hat and walk about with a bow and arrow — a businessman in the 21st century!”

Among many awards, MacMillan won the RIBA Award for Architecture on four occasions and the Royal Scottish Academy Gold Medal in 1975. He was appointed OBE in 1992.

At the time of his death he was vice-president of the Glasgow School of Art.

He is survived by his wife, Angela, and by their son and three daughters.

Professor Andy MacMillan, born December 11 1928, died August 16 2014

Mary Dejevsky’s sees double standards in the government’s proposals to deal with British Islamic State jihadis (May’s short memory, 25 August). But she sets up straw men as examples: there is no proposal to punish people just for travelling to Syria or Iraq, nor any presumption that those who do are jihadis. Even if, as she suggests, we are responsible for allowing extremism to fester, does that imply we should not react to the threat posed by these individuals’ return? Should we give murderers a pass for allowing them to get riled up in the UK?

Nor is it fair to suggest that the government tars all British Muslims with this brush. I can’t believe I’m defending this government. Let’s criticise it for its legion failings; making up new ones seems redundant.
Paul Smith
London

• Nobody has ever given an explanation of the difference between the “moderate” groups fighting in Syria and the “extremist” groups. Could anyone suggest which of the republican and loyalist terrorist groups fighting in Northern Ireland were “moderate” and which were “extremist”? But the moderate/extremist argument is used to justify the funding of terrorists because “we can’t stand back and allow these extremists to take over” type of argument. So we then support the Nato bombing of Libya that murdered thousands of civilians and levelled the city of Sirte in 2011, or the training and arming of the “moderate” groups who explode car bombs outside hospitals because allegedly the Syrian army were occupying the buildings.
Louis Shawcross
Hillsborough, County Down

• Your editorial (Lessons of failure, 25 August) eloquently catalogues the catastrophic consequences of successive governments’ interference in foreign conflicts, particularly those in the Middle East and north Africa. Well-intentioned but simplistic actions are usurped by power-hungry ideologues who readily recruit rudderless youth to be their cannon fodder. The editorial ends with a quote from Tony Blair that we would do well to restrict our actions to “what works”. Blair’s record in the Middle East is not a shining example and the question remains: what does work and how good is the supporting evidence?
Michael Kettlewell
Over Norton, Oxfordshire

• Under no circumstances should British Isis fighters have their citizenship removed (Report, 25 August). How do they differ in law from any other British mercenaries, such as those who fought for Ian Smith? Given the choice of a life of pointless harassment by jobcentres and a misguided but apparently “noble cause” in Iraq, it seems a no-brainer to me.
Ken Baldry
London

• To bar returning jihadis from entering Britain by revoking their passports is analogous to fly-tipping: refusing to deal with our own rubbish, not caring who is left with that unpleasant and potentially expensive task. That is why the EU is right to legislate against it in the interests of the community at large.
Herbert Munk
Coventry

• The killing of James Foley was without doubt appalling and reprehensible. But what exactly are we supposed to find so horrendous that a coalition of western forces should descend upon the Middle East with the unattainable objective of restoring some kind of order acceptable to western interests?

Is it the fact that James Foley was beheaded? Hardly, since our ally Saudi Arabia has publicly beheaded 19 people this month, without western leaders making anything of this.

Perhaps then it is the killing of innocent journalists that is meant to provoke us into supporting military action? Hardly that either, since, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, US forces in Iraq killed 13 journalists in 2003-05 alone in ways that are thought to be non-accidental. I don’t recall any objections from Tony Blair.

The truth is we are being led into supporting another war; either for unstated reasons relating to oil and nefarious geostrategy, or in response to the inane call of the “something has to be done” brigade. The intervention being proposed ought to be as unpopular as the one that began in 2003, which lies at the root of the present predicament.
Steve Cox
York

• Why does “humanitarian aid” by Russia (Report, 23 August), albeit uninvited by Ukraine , draw “swift condemnation from US and European countries”, while the bombing of Isis-controlled Syria is contemplated by the US and other European countries without the need to even speak to the Syrian head of state?
Richard Bull
Woodbridge, Suffolk

Peter Wilby is right that GCSE is no longer needed since education for all is being extended to age 18 (Report, 23 August). But beyond that, the whole structure of secondary education should be closely examined, with the dominance of academic subjects questioned and perhaps trade apprenticeships seen as worthwhile alternatives to university degrees for school leavers. The Tomlinson proposals, based on diplomas at the end of schooling, should be revisited.

But who is to do this? One legacy of the Gove years should be the recognition that responsibility for change in education should never be vested in one person. A national education council should be established, financed by but independent of government, with a balanced membership of teachers’ leaders, MPs, academics and other prominent members of society. It should be first charged to make recommendations on the restructuring of secondary education and to present these to parliament, via the secretary of state. The recent careful thought on the potential future for education expressed in the writings of academics like Peter Mortimore, Richard Pring, Chris Husbands, Michael Fielding, Frank Coffield, John Bangs and others, with the insights of the teacher unions and associations should underpin the thinking of such a council. Its second task should be to monitor such changes over the coming years and report to parliament, say every two years, on progress.
Professor Michael Bassey
Author of Education for the Inevitable

• The GCSE results did not end the gaming of qualifications as Michael Gove planned. They showed a more odious form of gaming is operating, manipulation by league tables. The drop in multiple entries is down to making only the first entry counts, so students cannot resit. The chance to resit is a basic right which applies in the driving test. If failure on the first test meant the driver was unable to do it again, many people would be unable to drive. In any test the relevant issue is whether the standard has been reached, and to deny GCSE students the right to do this is clearly a cap on aspiration.

We need an urgent reversal of policy, especially with GCSE English results dropping. English GCSE is required for many jobs and most university courses. Many A-level courses in fact demand a grade B in English. So there can be no acceptance of 16-year-olds failing in this subject. The sixth forms will have to provide remedial classes, and resits will have to take place irrespective of the ban on resits. If not, then students are going to have their futures blighted merely by a change in exam reporting.
Trevor Fisher
Stafford

• Alison Wolf’s celebration of outlawing less academic “equivalents” to GCSE underlines her lack of understanding (All hail the new GCSEs, 19 August). I meet ex-students who smile ruefully, say “school wasn’t for me” and then detail their successful career – as a plumber, nurse or electrician. We should be ashamed as a nation that people leave school thinking it wasn’t for them. Surely the point of vocational education is that it reaches those an academic education does not reach. Any further review of our education system should start with delivering the basics of literacy and numeracy and then produce as diverse a range of courses as there are students to study them.
Nicky Campbell
Macclesfield, Cheshire

• When even your own education correspondents refer to the “pass rate” for English being 61.7% (Report, 22 August), is it any wonder that students who achieve D, E, F and G grades are feeling the pain? These, too, are pass rates, fantastic achievements for some whose gifts may lie elsewhere, often undiscovered due to the pressure of those damned performance tables. An F is not a fail.
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset

Some readers (Letters, 25 August) may need reminding that in the UK we do not make our laws or supervise our public servants by public outcry, taking heed of the latest or largest crowd of demonstrators. We recognise that such crowds are never more than a tiny and unrepresentative proportion of the general population.

We elect local representatives who can study issues in depth and come to reasoned conclusions. If they turn out to be corrupt or lazy or put in place policies they promised not to (that’s you, Mr C) we can vote them out next time. Supported by a strong judiciary, this works, in the long run, to everyone’s benefit – even if it doesn’t feel like it at the moment for many disabled people, for example. Or some Scots, maybe.

Having Scottish, English and Welsh parliaments in whatever format only makes decision-making more remote. For people in Inverness, the Edinburgh parliament is no closer than Westminster. For people in Leeds a Yorkshire parliament would still feel remote. And each layer of parliaments puts the population one more step away from the real decision-making, which will always be in London and Brussels. If the EU has a democratic deficit now, a faux federal structure for the UK would create a similar deficit at the UK level.

Localism is a mirage. It works for Alex Salmond because he can play at being a big fish in a small pond. For the rest of us the need is for reinforced MPs at Westminster. I expect my MP, who represents South Cambridgeshire, to understand that the prosperity and happiness of the people of Perth (or Penzance or Portrush or Pontypool) is as important to my family’s prosperity and happiness as those of people two villages away.
David Sands
Royston, Hertfordshire

• Under Article 15 of the Act of Union 1707, Scotland was granted £398,085 10s formally to offset future liability for future English national debt, informally to reimburse the Scots elite for the botched New Caledonian scheme. If Scotland votes for independence, can we have a refund? The economists can adjust for inflation.
Hugh Smith
London

We share the concerns about the introduction of fees to take cases to employment tribunals and the barrier to justice this will create (Report, 18 August). Even before fees came in, it was often incredibly hard for victims to get justice and we fear it has become harder, enabling more bad employers to get away with breaking the law. ATL fully supported and funded one of the cases you referred to, that of Rebecca Raven, a teacher who was dismissed when she became pregnant. Regrettably, we are still having to pursue the owners of the school concerned for the payment she was awarded at a tribunal in September 2012 for discrimination and unfair dismissal. Her employers, who intimated that maternity leave was bad for business, have so far not paid a penny.

While Rebecca’s case was lodged before the introduction of fees, ATL will continue to pay the fees for all members whose cases we take to tribunal, in common with other unions. We will keep arguing against fees, but such cases show why it is so important for workers to belong to trade unions if they are to stand any chance of getting access to justice following the changes the coalition government introduced.
Andy Peart
Assistant general secretary, Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Your correspondent (Letters, 22 August) appears to be unaware that, since the year 2000, the Church of England marriage ceremony gives the minister the option of addressing the parents of both bride and groom with the following words: “N and N have declared their intention towards each other. As their parents, will you now entrust your son and daughter to one another as they come to be married?” To which they are expected to reply: “We will.”

While I give every couple this option, in my experience the majority are still enthralled by traditionalism and prefer to be given away by their fathers.
Anne Spargo
Priest-in-charge of the Severnside Benefice of Churches, Frampton-on-Severn, Gloucestershire

• Adrian Smith’s delight at having his wife included when answering the question “who gives this woman?” at his daughter’s wedding would have been more impressive if he had eschewed the whole ridiculous business of a bride being “given away”. Daughters should rebel at being hawked around from parent to groom like some sort of frothy present. If they’re grown-up enough to get married, they’re grown-up enough not to be regarded as a chattel.
Charlotte Hofton
Ryde, Isle of Wight

• Dr Barbara Wilson and her husband Mike must feel disappointed that their story, due to a production error, was omitted from your feature (The secrets of long-term love, Weekend, 23 August) – but I did catch up with them in the online version.

Perhaps you could squeeze them in sometime in place of Blind date. Yes, I know it makes compulsive reading, but all these chaste “pecks on the cheek” do get a bit monotonous. Don’t they ever end up in bed together or, more acceptably, in a long-term relationship with each other?
Phoebe Newton
Northallerton, North Yorkshire

Your feature on England’s new coastal access (Travel, 23 August) underplays the achievement by merely referring to it as a coastal path. The whole point of England’s coastal access is that it provides spreading room, where the public has the right to walk, between the path and the sea and inland to the first boundary. The Welsh coastal path, although brilliant, is only a route; there is no spreading room.
Kate Ashbrook
The Open Spaces Society

• So Shetland is “nearby” to Orkney (Report, 21 August)? Can I assume that the Guardian style guide will now require Birmingham and Bristol to be described as “nearby” to London, since both involve similar distances? Although I note that public transport between Orkney and Shetland is much trickier than between London and either of those cities. And some in Shetland might remind you that they are nearer Norway than Edinburgh.
Dudley Coates
Gillingham, Dorset

• Reassuring to hear (Letters, 20 August) that an Indian fungus is about to be unleashed on the dreaded Himalayan balsam. Could it also have a go at the allegedly Himalayan rose-ringed parakeet? This squawking, screeching, braying, mob-handed, flash city-boy of a bird (they all vote Tory) has become so common in this area that Wikipedia refers to them as Kingston Parakeets.
Mike Hine
Kingston on Thames, Surrey

• Bárðarbunga about to erupt (Passnotes, 20 August). Berlusconi up to his tricks again?
Robert Walls
Camberley, Surrey

• My eight-year-old daughter, Gráinne, swims in the Irish Sea almost daily from late March to early October. She describes David Cameron’s choice of swimwear as “a wimpsuit” (Photo story, 23 August).
Cian Molloy
Wicklow

“Turner and Constable: A rivalry resumed, but who is best?” (Front page trail, 25 August). Really? Don’t we deserve better?
Brian Lawrence
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Matthew Parris asked whether the vehemence of online postings is fuelling extremism

Sir, Credit to Matthew Parris (“Don’t lump all Muslims in the extremist camp”, Aug 23) for stating the truth that has dared not speak its name. Anti-Islam is every bit as insidious and frightening as
antisemitism has been for centuries. Hatred of a seventh of the world’s people is one of the few ideologies found in equal measure within left, right, educated, uneducated, liberal, illiberal, rich and poor; and mass graves and gas chambers stand as a warning to those who cannot heed the lessons of history of which Mr Parris wisely reminds them.

James Abdul Rahman Brierley

Knighton, Leicester

Sir, Mr Parris’s article is absolutely correct that it is wrong to regard all Muslims as extremists. However, the interpretation and practice of Islam has clearly become perverted by some of its adherents. Surely the mass of mainstream Muslims have a responsibility to try to make their extremist co-religionists “righteous” too.

David Levy

London N3

Sir, Matthew Parris’s argument is flawed. Jews do not seek world domination. The Jewish diaspora has no desire to convert humanity to Judaism. Jews do not seek to proselytise by subjugation and violence. Muslims seek the creation of a single world ummah which will replace Christianity (and all other faiths and philosophies), political democracy and economic capitalism with Sharia. Most Muslims live peaceably enough in western countries influenced by centuries of Christianity, but they are bound to pray for the ultimate Muslim victory over all infidels.

Politicians and governments cannot defeat Muslim global ambition piecemeal. Legislation will do little to help. The non-specific geographical battle is not primarily about guns as yet but about ideas. British society, apostate from Christianity, lacks vision, cohesion and purpose. Instead of offering feeble and miserable platitudes, Britain’s Christian leaders should have the courage to refute Islam’s ideology and claims.

The Rev Dr Robert Anderson

Blackburn, W Lothian

Sir, Matthew Parris says he does not like Islam or Judaism. Perhaps he should extend this dislike to all religions that begin with a capital letter. To paraphrase Krishnamurti, any rigid belief system rules out the infinity of ideas and beliefs beyond that system. Or maybe Mr Parris should reflect that people, not religions, are the problem.

Graham Weiner

London N10

Sir, Matthew Parris is clearly right that stigmatising all Muslims in the UK is absurd but his substitution of Jews for Muslims is absurd since Jews never ever engaged in anti-regime wars, mass kidnappings of young women, televised beheadings of westerners, campaigns to change our diet and way of life, and so on.

Professor Yorick Wilks

Oxford

Sir, Matthew Parris rightly defends ordinary Muslims but misses the opportunity to comment on one monstrous issue. Islamic leaders have been quick to declare fatwas against westerners they consider have been disrespectful of their religion but they are silent as barbarous extremists tear its reputation to shreds.

Brian Parker

Dartmouth

Turnout for PCC elections might be higher if e-voting was treated as a serious option

Sir, The new police commissioner for the West Midlands was elected by only 5 per cent of the electorate and at a cost of £18 per vote (“Low turnout in police vote costs £3.7m”, Aug 23). The Electoral Reform Society called it “a very depressing turnout”. One possible cause was holding the poll in the holidays. The government should grasp the nettle of e-voting to encourage greater participation in the democratic process. We are expected to submit tax returns even from sunloungers abroad, so why not let us vote from them as well?

Peter Saunders

Salisbury

Rome airport has solar panels over its carparks – a win-win notion

Sir, I was most impressed by an Italian version of the solar farm. The huge car-parks at Rome airport are covered with roofed carports bearing solar panels. These generate solar power while keeping the cars in shade, so drivers returning to their cars do not need to add to fuel pollution by turning the air-conditioning to its top setting. Many UK regional airports could do this; acres of sprawling panels are no worse than acres of parked cars.

Joanne Aston

Over Silton, N Yorks

Are there lessons for today to be learnt from the history of British foreign policy?

Sir, I am delighted to see my friend and former pupil Philip Bobbitt up there with Gladstone and Palmerston (Aug 25), but he never prescribed western-style democracy as “a prerequisite to peace and reform in the Middle East”. What he did prescribe were “states of consent” which were not necessarily western-style democracies, but would, by legitimising their regimes, provide the only effective barriers against the “states of terror” that — he foresaw with terrifying accuracy — were likely to develop in the Middle East and across the whole world. Any resemblance to the policy of Neville Chamberlain is very hard to detect.

Sir Michael Howard

Eastbury, Berks

The carillon in the tower of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam, overlooks the Prinsengracht below  Photo: ALAMY

SIR – I too enjoy tuneful church bells (Letters, August 21). For the past 18 months my wife and I have lived near to the Westerkerk, one of the major churches in the centre of Amsterdam. Its bells also ring out every 15 minutes, but the tune changes every three months or so. To date we have enjoyed, among others, Dvorak’s New World Symphony and the theme to the classic John Wayne western, The Alamo.

David Rendell
Amsterdam