Isi Metzstein remembered

The completion of St Paul’s church in Glenrothes in 1957 marked a dramatic new chapter in the long history of the practice that designed it, the Glasgow firm of Gillespie Kidd & Coia. The project was the latest in a string of commissions that the Italian-born Coia - then the only surviving member of the three nominal partners — had secured from Glasgow’s Roman Catholic Church. 

However, St Paul’s starkly abstract composition of white painted brickwork and monumental, Le Corbusier-inspired glazing represented a remarkable departure from the language of the churches that Coia had authored before the war.  Unsurprisingly so. The architects responsible for its design were in fact two men still in their twenties, Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, who would subsequently assume design responsibility for all the work produced under the practice’s name. While the firm continued until 1987, the significant projects belong to the first 20 years, a period of quite spectacular productivity and invention.

These were years in which large numbers of working class Catholics were being dispersed from the centre of Glasgow to urban expansions and new towns - a circumstance that ensured no shortage of work for a practice that enjoyed close ties to the church. The lapsed Presbetyrian MacMillan and Jewish Metzstein realised a total of 17 Roman Catholic churches. For the same client, they designed what is arguably their masterpiece, the now tragically dilapidated St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross (1966). There were hospitals and schools too, while in the seventies a shift of focus towards the higher education sector produced a trio of projects south of the border: the Lawns Halls of Residence at the University of Hull (1968), the library and housing for Wadham College in Oxford (1977), and finally the magesterial Robinson College in Cambridge (1980).

All this was accomplished before either man was 50. Both MacMillan and Metzstein would go on to play enormously important roles in architectural education - accepting respectively chairs at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh - but as with the careers of many of the great talents of their generation, a disappointment remains that they might have found the opportunity to build for decades more were it not for the public spending cuts of the late seventies. If Metzstein fell foul to that particular accident of history, we can at least be thankful that he escaped another. He was born to Polish emigres in the Berlin of 1928, escaping to Scotland when he was 11 by way of kindertransport. Six years later he secured a job with Coia – the connection being that a friend’s mother was sewing for Coia’s wife – and proceeded to spend a number of years  balancing that commitment with evening classes at the art school.

Despite the number and variety of the projects that MacMcillan and Metzstein realised, their oeuvre evidences a remarkable consistency of concern. The later work of Le Corbusier remained a touchstone - an influence discernible both in the practice’s preoccupation with the play of light through deep wall constructions and in the highly developed architectural promenades that their plans engineer. However, as Metzstein acknowledged on the occasion of the 2007 retrospective of the practice’s work, “We did not take on board the full dogma of modernism. We wanted to strengthen the vocabulary of modernism wherever it was necessary.”

Much of that strengthening was directed towards forging an architecture that presented a more convincing urban proposition. Living in post-war Glasgow, they were acutely aware of the damage then being done to the city’s fabric and came to recognise the Victorian city to which Mackintosh and Thomson had so inventively contributed as a valuable model. The art school proved a particularly rich source of ideas. Compare the facades at Robinson and those of Mackintosh’s building - each effortlessly shifting gear between the domestic and the monumental, maintaining a sense of urban hierarchy while making explicit the organisation of the spaces housed behind. This isn’t eclecticism but an influence that Metzstein and Macmillan absorbed deeply and disseminated to successive generations of students. They were great architects by any measure, but in the scale of their contribution to the development of modern architecture in Scotland, they are without rival.