Isi Metzstein

Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was an influential architect working in the European modernist style of Le Corbusier and the American Frank Lloyd Wright.

The ruins of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross

Metzstein worked closely with Andrew MacMillan at the Glasgow firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. Their masterpiece is generally reckoned to be St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross. Completed in 1966, the three-storey concrete ziggurat stood on the banks of the Clyde, a shining tribute to Corbusier. But as well as worldwide acclaim, it also attracted fierce criticism. Some called it “the spaceship”.

The team’s design for St Peter’s exterior was inspired both by Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, and his monastery at La Tourette, which opened four years later. The interiors at Cardross were panelled in solid wood or veneer, echoing the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Even traditionalist magazines like Country Life praised it, while specialist journals such as Concrete Quarterly found it “a splendidly virile and rugged building”. In 1967 it won Gillespie, Kidd & Coia an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. But before long there were reports of jammed windows, door handles falling off, the chapel flooding and a series of ominous creaks emanating from the huge beams that soared above the sanctuary.

The building’s descent into disrepair was hastened further when the Second Vatican Council decided to train priests in local communities rather than at seminaries. The building began its slide into ruin. It eventually shut down in 1980 and, after a spell as a drugs rehabilitation centre, was abandoned and vandalised. As its owners and the authorities dithered, the buildings were ransacked, smashed and set ablaze. Polished corridors leading to the glass-sided refectory were wrecked, along with the skylit chapel with its vast granite altar.

The interior was gutted, and it now stands as a monument to decades of abuse and decay. As the Scottish architectural academic 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”.

Israel Metzstein was born on July 7 1928 in the Mitte district of Berlin, to Jewish parents originally from Poland. He was one of five children brought up by their mother after her husband died during a routine operation in 1933.

With war looming in 1939, Britain offered to take a quota of Jewish children up to the age of 17 under the Kindertransport (Child Transport) scheme. Isi, then 11, was sent to Scotland, where he lodged with a family in Clydebank, and later in a Jewish hostel, until being reunited with his mother and siblings.

At 18 he was hired by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and, with MacMillan, who joined the practice in 1954, he flourished in the atelier system set up by Jack Coia, one of the original partners. Together, Metzstein and MacMillan were given free rein to develop their professional and artistic skills and went on to design many Modernist schools, colleges and churches. The Roman Catholic Church was the practice’s biggest single client.

In 1956 Metzstein and MacMillan started work on the St Paul’s project in Glenrothes, Scotland’s second post-war New Town. Later they designed the red-brick Robinson College, Cambridge; the library at Wadham College, Oxford; and the halls of residence at the University of Hull.

In later life, Metzstein complained about the “disturbing superficiality of current architecture”.

“Recent and current practice,” he wrote, manages “ to dissociate the façade from internal and external obligations.” What he called “highly seductive stretch-wrapping techniques” deprived architecture of “much cultural and historic richness”.

Metzstein taught at the Glasgow School of Art and, as half of the duo fondly known as Andy and Isi, received the RIBA Annie Spink award in 2008 for excellence in architectural education.

Isi Metzstein married Danielle Kahn, who was also of central European Jewish parentage, and had been born in the south of France during the Nazi occupation. They had three children.

Isi Metzstein, born July 7 1928, died January 10 2012