Synopses & Reviews
This fictional work about the construction and decay of a late modernist building can also be read as an essay on our contemporary unease with modernism in general. Author Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, based it on research into St. Peter's Seminary, a college complex commissioned by the Catholic Church in the 1950s, completed in 1968, and abandoned by 1980. On the outskirts of Glasgow - itself a city with a vexed relationship to Le Corbusier-esque modernism - the building is rich with histories: of its architects, its residing student priests, the drug addicts it once housed and treated, and the local teenagers for whom it is a kind of Gothic recreation center. This book takes the material remains of modernism and treats them from a literary point of view.
Synopsis
Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual. But it is the site too of a more recent disappearance. A young artist, intent on exploring the complex and its history, has gone missing among the wreckage. Months later his lover visits the place, unsure what she is looking for, and finds herself drawn into the strange nexus of energies and memories that persist there. Sanctuary is a story about what survives--of bodies, ideas, objects and the artistic or literary forms that might describe them--in the wake of catastrophe. Invoking key works of the last century--the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the art of Robert Smithson, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky--it maps a small but resonant portion of the ruins of the recent past.
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). His writing appears regularly in such publications as frieze, Artforum, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Wire. He lives in Canterbury.