T R I C O R N S H O P C E N T R E

February 12, 2022 11:22 PM

Dubbed one of the ugliest buildings in Britain, the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth was a 1960s Brutalist structure intended to house shops, parking facilities and flats but was poorly maintained from the outset. Demolished in 2004, it lives on on Youtube. Here urban explorers in 1989 investigate its abandoned nightclub; here's a 6m documentary piece with different views of the structure, plus comments from the architects and a digital artist inspired by it; and finally a compilation of slightly-repetitive local news coverage on the day demolition started
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue (30 comments total)

From the wiki: 'Essayist Jonathan Meades commented: "You don't go knocking down Stonehenge or Lincoln Cathedral. I think buildings like the Tricorn were as good as that. They were great monuments of an age."' OK, buddy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:39 PM on February 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

Provincial architecture in the UK has a much longer life than the USA. This means that when buildings like the Tricorn were being planned and built, the dominant ideas in urban planning were extremely car-centric. This has now been generally recognised as a mistake, but places like Preston and Northampton are still struggling on with massive brutalist car-centric buildings that don’t really work and mess up the town centre.
posted by The River Ivel at 11:57 PM on February 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

In the late 80s we lived close to the Byker Wall on Tyneside in NE England. Hundreds of unfit-for-human red-brick Victorian terraced houses were clear felled in the 60s to provide brand new rooms with a view which would foster community by having a mix of shared and private space. The new housing was constructed in the 70s to be people-centric; deliberately turning its back on a proposed urban motorway [which never got built]. The original vision deliberately incorporated high-maintenance wood and brick finish: the idea being that the local authority would be constantly around gussying up the project to show the residents that The Man cared. Fail! right there: the Right announced that there was no such thing as society and poof! there was no money to pay the chippies and painters to be there. Architects show us possibilities for living in a different way; pity about the embedded conservatism which resists change.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:35 AM on February 13, 2022 [10 favorites]

Thanks for links to a local landscape. I've never quite been able to understand the Prince Charles remark on it quoted in the Wiki article - "a mildewed lump of elephant droppings". As one would think that would be a more organic shape. I may be overthinking it.

I'll add to your links this blog post from Portsmouth: A City in Bits & The Tricorn, which also has a link to a flyover video put together from the architectural drawings. I haven't watched all of the videos in your links so apologies if this is excerpted in them.

The same architect, Owen Luder, also designed Fawley Power Station, nearer to me, the chimneys of which have always been a rather romantic view on the other side of the water. Demolition has been going on for a couple of years now.

I didn't know that Luder grew up in what sounds like poverty (born to an unmarried seamstress in 1928). Looks like his route out was through grammar schools and adult ed at a polytechnic - that may be less possible for children now the golden age of adult ed has passed.
posted by paduasoy at 1:38 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

The 1989 urban explorers video is basically the pilot for a Netflix series that needs to be commissioned right now!
posted by rongorongo at 1:57 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'll add to your links this blog post from Portsmouth: A City in Bits & The Tricorn, which also has a link to a flyover video put together from the architectural drawings

That flyover render is excellent and gives a real sense of how alien and interesting the building was (or was intended to be, there's a hefty dose of nostalgia involved here). The FPP isn't exactly comprehensive and I was hoping people would dig up other links/clips like this, cheers!
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 2:19 AM on February 13, 2022

The 1989 urban explorers video is basically the pilot for a Netflix series that needs to be commissioned right now!

Ha, definitely! One of the things I liked most about it was how it was entirely of its era, yet not how its era is usually depicted in popular media. Truth stanger than fiction, we all live in the ruins of the past, etc, etc
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 2:22 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I knew I saw some footage of the current state of the place last year and after some searching I found it hidden in a longer video about the testing of a field ration. Ah, the wonders of the internet.

This is it, a video from Atomic Shrimp who, as a bonus, also points out the last remains of the Center.
posted by Kosmob0t at 4:00 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

This reminds me very much of the Werdmuller center here in Cape Town.
The article I linked to describes the immense gap between the architect's admirable intentions, and what it has become.
I don't entirely agree with the slant of the article I linked to as it makes it seem as if the building's failure is due to the conservative impulses of the customers who preferred the commercial, sanitised space of the nearby Cavendish center to the more vibrant and racially diverse community of the Werdmuller.
The fact is that the Werdmuller is a uncomfortable and human-unfriendly lump of concrete. It might be interesting in a sculptural way, but it feels like the set of a horror movie. Brutalist and claustrophobic.
posted by Zumbador at 4:00 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was alway a huge fan of the Tricorn. Yes, it was deeply flawed in some respects, but almost all its problems stemmed from lack of maintenance and investment. The actual public spaces within the centre - pedestrianised courtyards, small independent retailers - are planning approaches that are very much back in fashion. Some archive images show that it was originally well used (local news site with many pop-ups, apologies). This kind of shopping centre is still built, only usually with 'anchor stores', big name retailers that draw people in to the smaller shops (which are, admittedly, all chain stores). The Tricorn tapped into the popular 'concrete jungle' narrative of the time, which was essentially anti-urban. The design may have been polarising, but it was bold, inventive, and different. Tearing it down was a populist move that was shortsighted in retrospect. Nearly twenty years on and the site is still a car park, even though a new development is periodically promised.
posted by srednivashtar at 5:20 AM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

It was beautiful. And now it's a parking lot, which doesn't seem like an aesthetic improvement.
posted by goatdog at 6:19 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

The only time I ever went to the Tricorn was a couple of childhood visits to the Laser Quest lasertag place that existed somewhere within it.

I would argue there is no finer setting for lasertag than deep in the bowels of a building that already looks like it belongs in some sci-fi dystopia. Brutalist concrete, smoke machines, disco lights and 90s dance music while fairly-safely playing pew-pew laser games - such a perfect combination.

As a kid I remember the overall building as feeling like something that "happened" in to existence rather than being "designed" in any sense that I was familiar with up to that point.
posted by BuxtonTheRed at 6:48 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I like Brutalist architecture. Sure there's some bad examples of the style, but that's true of any architectural trend. And yes, tearing them all down because that style is out of fashion right now is a bad idea.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:52 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

The original vision deliberately incorporated high-maintenance wood and brick finish: the idea being that the local authority would be constantly around gussying up the project to show the residents that The Man cared. Fail! right there: the Right announced that there was no such thing as society and poof! there was no money to pay the chippies and painters to be there. Architects show us possibilities for living in a different way; pity about the embedded conservatism which resists change.

This is one of the problems I have with architecture enthusiasts. Fail! is right. And it doesn't sound like one could blame embedded conservatism. It's a serious gamble, to design something with deliberately high maintenance needs. And then be shocked when people are reluctant to jump on board with high maintenance demands.

Similarly, the Tricorn, as with many examples of doomed architecture, are built on the vision of architects who may or may not be good at being visionaries. If only people would comply and get on board with the vision... seems key to the success (and the intention) of many brutalist examples, being designed for mass usage without the folly of antiquated design cues and aesthetic flourishes. You know, the things that are often found to be attractive and endearing and useful.

As it turns out, people sometimes have their own ideas, and the building was never all that loved by the those it was intended to serve from the get go. Architecture enthusiasts seem to have a problem sometimes equating bold, inventive, and different, with desirable, practical, and inviting. Some say the building was beautiful, but clearly, plenty felt otherwise.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:26 AM on February 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

Our daily walks through a 100-acre park abutting the University of Cincinnati include a portion where this Brutalist beauty dominates the otherwise pastoral views even as its fate has been sealed and only the manner of how to demolish it is still in question. It is a singularly polarizing piece of the city's architecture - especially since the university embarked upon the astounding mission to populate its campus with more than half a dozen remarkable buildings by world-renowned star-chitects like Gehry, Graves, Eisenman and Mayne - but we have become more than fond of it over the years and can't imagine the hole it will leave when it's gone.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 7:29 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

If only people would comply and get on board with the vision... seems key to the success (and the intention) of many brutalist examples, being designed for mass usage without the folly of antiquated design cues and aesthetic flourishes.

There are definitely a bunch of brutalist buildings out there that aren't designed for usability, but then there are a bunch of buildings in any vaguely modern architectural style that aren't designed for usability, too (and a whole bunch of older ones as well, which for some reason we tend to just give a pass to on that front for some reason). Bad usability - which is largely a function of interior design (in the sense of design and layout of interiors, not in the sense of choice of wallpaper) - is no more inherent to brutalism than to anything other style. "Visionary" architects who want to reimagine how spaces are used are a problem whatever their style, and a lot of brutalist buildings are designed around the way space is used, just with a particular aesthetic presentation.

Now, you may object to the aesthetics (personally I find most modern glass-heavy stuff uglier) but that is not about usability. It is also only a preference, as you note. There is nothing inherently unusable about concrete or simple designs without ornamentation. Cheap materials and bad maintenance (or design that requires a high level of maintenance) are not an issue with brutalism itself, and are a problem in many structures with ornamentation and "aesthetic flourishes" as well.
posted by Dysk at 8:06 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think it’s stunningly beautiful. Some people have no taste.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:21 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

Here in Bay Area, I know of two attempts to “restore” city center areas, with a “modernist” architecture building featuring a variety of people attracting things like shops, food, and entertainment. Back the 80’s San Jose built this thing, I forgot the name, that would revive downtown which had been killed in the early 60’s by a shopping mall built a few miles away. Loads of concrete. Rapid turnover of occupants. Slow death. I don’t know what’s there now having moved away 30 years ago. Here in San Francisco, they built the Metreon in what had been a major center of flophouses. Same idea, shops, food, entertainment. It too had a rapid turnover of occupants despite being right in the middle of a very busy downtown. A friend of mine took a design course and for the first class, the teacher walked everybody over to the Metreon, where they entered by the main entrance. He asked them, would you want to go in here, pointing at the sloping down low ceiling, and the basic darkness of the space. No, they said. They proceeded to go around the inside as the teacher pointed out various design choices that made the space very people unfriendly. My question regarding all these architect designed spaces, that are meant to attract people, is don’t these architects ever question their design choices based on what people would think and feel about the place? Or is it just some I’m an artist and I’ll teach them to like it…
posted by njohnson23 at 9:49 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Low dark wide space is cheap to build with modern tech, might be the main problem there. Lots of plans founder when the vision meets the budget.
posted by clew at 9:58 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

In my hometown in Ontario, a 1990 post-modern shopping mall in the downtown core is in the chopping block and is slated to be torn down in the next year or two. You would not need to be told it was built in 1990, as its esthetic is so strongly of its time it may as well be Stranger Things season six: flamingo pink, slate grey, ferns, an arching natural light galleria above.

It has the misfortune to have been built literally adjacent to and connected with a 1973 mall. The arrival of the second mall hastened the decline of the core that had begun twenty years earlier with the expropriation of blocks and blocks for redevelopment. I suspect that assorted retail head offices across the continent learned there was a new mall in town, naturally they all put a new store in place, unaware that they already had one in what is essentially the same building. Thus you would have two Coles’ Books, two Tip Top men’s formal wear, two Fairweather women’s clothes, etc, literally ninety seconds’ walk apart. Inevitably the new store just cut into the business of the old store, so within eighteen months the new store would be shut and the old one would have stumbled, usually fatally.

In the last twenty-five years, the newer mall has never been above maybe 40% occupancy, and one of its three floors has, I think, never had a retail tenant.

The developer in 1990 actually purposely overbuilt it with the expectation that in the fullness of time, office towers would go up above it. I think architecturally it could support the condo towers that are slated for the site, but I suspect the stench of failure on the existing building is too great, so it will have to be levelled.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:30 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

My question regarding all these architect designed spaces, that are meant to attract people, is don’t these architects ever question their design choices based on what people would think and feel about the place? Or is it just some I’m an artist and I’ll teach them to like it…

As I understand it, this idea is called formalism, and it's kind of the old fashioned idea of architecture - you plonk something down and expect people to live with the idea that you had. This is severely out of fashion in architecture school, so expect a lot more responsive, eco-friendly buildings to start getting built when these architecture students get to lead their own teams. Sometime in the 2050s, maybe (disclaimer: I am not an architect).

Also, taking it back to the UK, the Byker Wall wasn't just designed to have a bunch of chippies doing things - it had a series of 'hobby rooms', meant to support people's activities in neutral spaces. When I was living in Newcastle in the early 2000s, all these rooms had been lost and forgotten, the keys scattered, but researchers tracked them down and forced the owners of the building to reopen them. I remember it being a mind-blowing idea that there would be spaces devoted to something that wasn't about profit, which was then lost in over time.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:37 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

That chemistry building in Cincinnati is awesome looking. I usually don’t like Brutalist stuff (too blocky/dense feeling) but the height of that tower makes it less, uh, brutal to me.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:07 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’ll put my name down as someone who loves brutalist architecture. I was kind of surprised when I realized so many people hate it. Something about it reminds me of the “future utopia” idea that I think sounds amazing. I really hope all of these aren’t torn down.
posted by Bunglegirl at 5:06 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

expect a lot more responsive, eco-friendly buildings to start getting built when these architecture students get to lead their own teams

But that’s what the developers and architects said about what they were building in the 1970s and 1980s (that I remember personally) and I would be surprised if they weren’t saying it fairly often in the 1950s and 1960s. I’m dubious that we have a good diagnosis of why Projects fail, though "built to leak" and "the operations budget vanished" neither help.

I was semi-admiring a new building for having exactly only the old fashioned features that I associate with not leaking when my sweetie pointed out that it seems to be not exactly an apartment building but a managed senior care facility. Now we wonder if commercial buildings are usually different when the same entity expects to build and maintain them for decades.
posted by clew at 5:06 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

Wood and brick are relatively high maintenance, but, properly maintained, can last pretty much forever. Many low or no maintenance products tend to have a design lifespan measured in single digit decades…at which point they have to be landfilled and replaced.
posted by rockindata at 5:54 AM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are definitely a bunch of brutalist buildings out there that aren't designed for usability,

The Tricorn Center had apartments (which no one has mentioned, which is kind of funny) that were only able to be occupied for less than a decade before they were unmaintainable and abandoned.

Provincial architecture in the UK has a much longer life than the USA. This means that when buildings like the Tricorn were being planned and built, the dominant ideas in urban planning were extremely car-centric.

The dominant idea in US urban planning is still car-centric. A tiny number of cities are doing something a bit different (for the past few years), but the vast majority (even the biggest) any other transit (even walking) is barely considered at all.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:18 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like Brutalist architecture. Sure there's some bad examples of the style, but that's true of any architectural trend. And yes, tearing them all down because that style is out of fashion right now is a bad idea.

I'm sure that in theory there are humanist Brutalist structures, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. It seems suspiciously like part of the style was a deliberate, almost mocking, disregard for centuries of tradition (which as others have mentioned, are sometimes just pleasantries, but in some cases also provide signals as to function), and a desire for people to conform to the manufactured space, rather than the other way around. They're palaces—ones devoted to Architecture and the triumph of the Architect.

Can you really blame the public for not warming up to a style a style that's so dripping with arrogance?

There is an old saying about tearing down fences before you know why they were put up, and it seems like Brutalist architecture is almost always an exercise in tearing down a whole lot of fences, with little apparent regard for why they might have been put up.

I'd much rather live or work in a not-particularly-unique structure, built according to the established traditions and accumulated knowledge of centuries, rather than in some asshole's idea of a social experiment or statement written in concrete.

Brutalist architecture was a fad, and while we should certainly consider keeping examples around (as lessons in what not to do, if nothing else), they seem like almost uniformly awful spaces to inhabit or use. Their preservation is certainly not worth monopolizing the valuable urban spaces that some examples inhabit.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:58 PM on February 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

You're still just describing formalism. Not all brutalism is formalist, and a fuckton of formalism isn't brutalist.

I'm sorry that there are some bad brutalist buildings near you, apparently, but they aren't all like that. There are brutalist chapels and churches, housing blocks, and community buildings that are well used and loved, with long histories. Meanwhile, there's cheaply built ornamented crap that is abandoned and torn down within the decade. There are also examples of the opposite in both cases.

Brutalism is a style, an aesthetic, not an ideology, nor an approach to usability and design.
posted by Dysk at 5:32 PM on February 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

(If anything, brutalism stands against formalism. From Wikipedia (emphasis mine): "Brutalism is not only an architectural style; it is also a philosophical approach to architectural design, a striving to create simple, honest, and functional buildings that accommodate their purpose, inhabitants, and location.")
posted by Dysk at 5:52 PM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

When you said "ugliest buildings in Britain," I immediately thought Central Milton Keynes in the 1980s, but this is way better.
posted by bendy at 8:59 PM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]