Name:The Tricorn

The Tricorn The Life and Death of a Sixties Icon - By Celia Clark & Robert Cook
Price £19.99 - Postage £4.90
Love it or hate it – there’s no middle ground in reactions to the Tricorn: the Brutalist, bold, multi-layered and multi-use megastructure built in Portsmouth between 1962 and 1966, and demolished in 2004. The Tricorn features in histories of architecture. Its chunky imagery spawned progeny - the Lloyds building’s exterior staircases, the Barbican’s curving upstands - leading ultimately to the birth of high-tech.
Click here for you tube link to interview with Celia
The Tricorn has been celebrated - and reviled - in festivals, ballet, music, performance art, videos, websites, films, virtual fly-throughs, poetry, books, television and radio. How many other buildings have inspired such an efflorescence? Despite its demolition, it still lives vividly in people’s memories and dreams.
Celia Clark and Robert Cook explore what makes an architectural icon – and what unmade it. This book sets the Tricorn within its architectural context: Brutalism and the 1960s. The unpopularity of Brutalism and the fact it was a commercial property affected the Tricorn’s fate. The book draws on two sources not usually combined: a collage of documentary material, and the rich seam of people’s descriptions of life in the building. The Tricorn’s architects: Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon explain the building’s genesis and reflect on its demise. The 1812 Overture was played at its demolition - a reflection of the Tricorn’s heroic status in people’s imagination.