For nearly three decades one of Scotland’s great modern buildings, St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, has lain empty, battered by the rain that sweeps across the Clyde, graffitied, vandalised and hidden behind wire fences and rampant vegetation.

Its dereliction is one of Scotland’s architectural tragedies.

Now the building, revered by architects, has been brought back to life courtesy of a project by film maker Murray Grigor and Oscar-nominated cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.

Space and Light is a 20 minute presentation on two screens. One shows Grigor’s 1972 colour film depicting a day in the life of the newly opened seminary, while the other shows a shot-by-shot black and white recreation filmed in the building’s husk this year.

The 1972 film follows the young priests as they go to class, eat in the refectory, study in the library and take communion. The 2009 version replays the same movements, but showing the collapsed roofs, pools of water, undergrowth and broken communion table that have taken their place.

“There are a few Kleenex moments,” said Grigor. “And it is a meditation on our times. It asks how a building, which is manifestly one of the great modernist masterpieces of contemporary Britain, can be left to ruin after only 14 years of use. It should never have happened. So it was to wake people up to that.”

Grigor received a Creative Scotland award from the Scottish Arts Council for the film. He believes the shot-by-shot recreation to be the first of its kind in the world.

Commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church, St Peter’s Seminary opened in 1966 to train priests. The firm Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were hired, with architects Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan assigned to the project.

In thrall to Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s modernist chapel at Ronchamp and monastery at La Tourette, the pair created their own concrete take on a sacred space. Gillespie, Kidd & Coia were rewarded the Royal Institute of British Architects’ top prize, the gold medal, for the building in 1969.

The seminary quickly reported problems. Windows jammed, the sanctuary beams creaked ominously and it was difficult

to heat.

But its decline owed more to cultural changes than architectural flaws. The flow of new priests slowed in the 1970s and the Catholic Church decided to educate its new intake in communities.

By the end of the 1970s the number of students numbered only in the 20s. It closed in 1980, and following a stint as a drug rehabilitation centre, fell into disrepair. It is now one of the 100 most endangered sites, according to the World Monuments Fund.

Architecture writer Frank Arneil Walker summed up its ruin: “In little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked.”

Recreating the original movie, which was filmed by crew fresh from working on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, proved difficult for Grigor and McGarvey. They filmed in the building’s shell during February’s snow storms. Rubble and undergrowth had to be cleared to get the shots. Cranes had to be used to film in spaces where there were once solid floors.

McGarvey, who was Oscar-nominated for his camera work on Atonement, described the experience as “cinematographic archaeology”.

The film is to receive its première at the Royal Scottish Academy for Music and Dance on September 21, with a live orchestra playing the original film’s score by Frank Spedding. The National Film Centre in Bradford, the Barbican in London, MoMA in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are all interested in showing it.

Grigor hopes that this project will be more than an elegy for a lost building, but will contribute to a ground swell of interest in resurrecting St Peter’s. NVA, the landscape art organisation, are planning an event on the site. Gareth Hoskins Architects in conjunction with Urban Splash, are in discussions as to how to find a more permanent use for the modernist masterpiece.

“It is my hope that our modest presentation can help spur on these ends,” said Grigor. “If it all comes true perhaps a third film could be on the cards. Then we could have the Cardross Triptych.”