IT is one of Scotland's most important modern ruins - and it looks likely, now, to remain a ruin.

Months after ambitious plans to transform St Peter's Seminary in Cardross into a cultural centre foundered, it looks likely to remain a forbidding modernist ruin for the foreseeable future.

Architects have this week called for the A-listed building in the Kilmahew woodland of Dunbartonshire, an architectural masterpiece by Scottish architects Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan, to remain a ruin.

For a decade the ground-breaking arts company NVA had appeared to have secured a new future for the lauded 1966 building as an arts venue and, in long term plans, cultural centre.

However, this year NVA, led by Angus Farquhar, has its long term funding from Creative Scotland cut in its controversial Regular Funding spending round, and the company closed this summer.

St Peter's, which appeared to have been saved from limbo, was seemingly cast back into perdition.

Now the building, which has been a ruin longer than it was ever a seminary, is back in the hands of the Archdiocese of Glasgow, and this week a statement from the church offered no hope for the building's long term future.

It says: "Over the decades we have tried everything to find a future for the former seminary."

For a time it seemed the empty building had a future life: NVA staged the Hinterland project in the ruins in 2016, and made a film with acclaimed artist Rachel Maclean, but its long term £11m project to transform the "stabilised ruins" into a cultural centre and performance space is over.

Since 2013, NVA spent £2.3m on the building, and organised a series of works, including removing hazardous waste and asbestos, the restoration of 80 vaults, improving paths, clearing away Rhododendron plants as well as other woodland management in the 104 acre site.

It is now unclear what will happen to these works, and whether any more will be done in the future.

The building, an impressive and foreboding modernist ruin in the Kilmahew woodland of Dunbartonshire, is A-listed, and the World Monument Fund has it scheduled as one of the world's most endangered cultural landmarks.

Professor Alan Dunlop and Professor Johnny Rodger of the Glasgow School of Art said that its present form, as a ruin, is its most likely future.

Professor Rodger, reader in urban literature at the GSA, said that the building's original purpose as a secluded seminary for priests, had been rendered obsolete quite quickly by the 'Vatican 2' reforms in the Catholic Church from 1962-65.

He added: "It is a wonderful piece of structural virtuosity....but for the future, I have the idea of it as a ruin, maybe it is best left as a ruin, and a ruin to the hubris of modernism.

"It is not a place of pilgrimage, in reality is is quite inaccessible."

Professor Rodger added: "I remember going to Hinterland and speaking to someone there, saying 'I am not sure about this, it's a lot of arts funding to spend in one place, it's very isolated, just because of where it is.'

"The irony is that it was built to train priests in isolation, and it will fail for that very reason."

When NVA announced it was to close, Fiona Hyslop, the culture secretary, asked Historic Environment Scotland to study potential uses.

The body has this week been tight lipped on its conclusions.

However, the statement from the Archdiocese says: "Over the decades we have tried everything to find a future for the former seminary.

"Its iconic status has, ironically, worked against it, as developers find it almost impossible to get the necessary permissions to bring the building back to life.

"We will continue to work with any group who want to look at providing some kind of future for the building. "

"We have also spoken to the Scottish Government about our concerns and they have instructed Historic Environment Scotland (HES) to carry out a review of the property with a view to securing the future of this architectural icon."

A spokesperson for Historic Environment Scotland said: “We are working with the Scottish Government and the site’s owners to explore longer term options for St Peter’s seminary, which is a unique site of cultural significance.”

Professor Alan Dunlop, a leading architect and academic, and a Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and the Royal Society of Arts, said: "My own view is that the work of NVA should be consolidated, the site cleared and St. Peter's left, as Isi Metzstein proposed, 'as a beautiful ruin'.

"Isi Metzstein said that he would enjoy the idea of St Peter’s Seminary being stripped of everything except the concrete and left as a “purely romantic conception of the building as a beautiful ruin”

He added: "Angus Farquhar of NVA, seemed to have the correct " little by little" approach, stating in 2017 at a seminar in Glasgow organised by the Architects' Journal that NVA would aim only 'to bring a small part of the seminary back to restoration: the chapel and the sanctuary' adding that most of the rest of the space would simply be consolidated because of lack of funds and that the building 'was more interesting in its current state'."