Church of St Benedict, Drumchapel (Gillespie, Kidd and Coia)

Job files, images and drawings related to project.

The opening of St Benedict's Church completed a development which started with the erection of a church hall designed to serve as a temporary church; followed by the completion & occupation of the presbytery. The grouping & designing of the individual buildings were strongly influenced by their situation on a narrow & difficult site in undistinguished surroundings and the form of the buildings was intended to produce a vigorous & recognisable group dominated by the church & making best use of the difficult site levels & shape while minimising the impact of the surrounding developments.

The church for approximately 600 persons, was planned to establish close contact between the congregants & the altar and was therefore arranged with a centrally placed open sanctuary surrounded by the seating. Within a diagonally disposed near-square plan were three connected & related spaces. The largest formed the nave, with the sanctuary occupying the central highest & best lighted space; a lady chapel continuous with the nave & served as a weekday chapel, & thirdly an enclosable pen with by giving access for private devotion at all times allowed the church greater security for potential vandalism & misuse. The usual ancillaries consisting of four sets of confessionals, narthex, working & priest sacristies completed the accommodation. The placing of these sacristies in the lower ground floor of the house combined the exploitation of the site levels with additional compactness, similarly the use of the narthex as a link between the hall & the church allowed continuous indoor circulation to all parts of the complex.

The church's character was achieved by the disciplined use of a small range of self-finished materials & the architectural control of natural & artificial light.

The material has been arranged using original Gillespie Kidd and Coia project reference codes.

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Catalogued by Tracy Wilkinson, GKC Project Archivist

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