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Gillespie, Kidd & Coia

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Giacomo Antonio Coia, also known as Jack Coia.

Gillespie, Kidd and Coia was an architectural practice which was most famous for their Modernist buildings. Roots of the practice date back to 1830, when the Scottish architect James Salmon established a practice named James Salmon & Son. He hired John Gaff Gillespie and later William Alexander Kidd. In 1915, after Salmon had left the practice in 1913, Giacomo Antonio Coia joined the practice. In 1928 Coia inherited the practice as both of his colleague architects died and renamed it by his former coworkers. He was mostly designing churches because his first and long-term client was the Roman Catholic Church. His early churches were designed in neo-romanesque style and in international-style modernism, mostly build out of brick. In the post-war period. Thomas Warnett Kennedy was a partner of the practice from 1939 to 1945, who helped Coia design some of the churches in Scotland. In the post-war era, Coia hired a 17-year-old Isi Metzstein. In that era, the practice worked mainly for a corporation that had a creative control over the practice by 1956. After Coia's last notable work St Charles in North Kelvinside, Metzstein and McMillan became creative leaders and completely changed the form of their architecture. Their source of creativity was linked to Le Corbusier's and Frank Lloyd Wright's Modernism. Their first Modernist church was St Paul's in Glenrothes. The practice also took part in the post-war reconstruction of Scottish cities and construction boom of new towns around Glasgow, where McMillan and Metzstein built churches. According to architectural critics, the practice created the most significant pieces of architecture in the period between 1956 and 1987. In the 1970s they stopped designing churches and focused on schools and university projects instead. In 1987, 6 years after Coia died, McMillan and Metzstein contributed the last architecture, the conversion of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford.

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lovro, July 22nd, 2018
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