The Tricorn The Life and Death of a Sixties Icon - By Celia Clark

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

The Tricorn: the Life and Death
of a Sixties Icon
Celia Clark and Robert Cook
Foreword by Tom Dyckhoff
ISBN 9780956249807
£19.99
Reviewed by Jon Wright - Twentieth Century Society Journal

As the years continue ton pass since its short-sighted destruction, Portsmouth's 'concrete casbah; gets more fondly remembered. The Tricorn: the life and death of a sixties icon, written by the building's staunchest local defenders, Celia Clark and Robert Cook, is therefore both a requiem and a warning. Exploring how it came to be built and how the subsequent tide of local and national dislike and ambivalence finally overwhelmed its ramparts, Clark and Cook leave no stone unturned. More widely, it's a timely investigation into why Portsmouth along with so many other towns in the country has so struggled to value its monumental civic architecture from the 1960s. The book is something of a compendium, a scrapbook of the building's front and back pages with all the various viewpoints allowed a voice. Structurally the book is unconventional, with fascinating and passionate passages devoted to the building's colourful history mixing with rather more prosaic architectural detail-chapter 7 is devoted to the history of the Tricorn Club. Anecdote forms a huge part of Clark's all-encompassing study, and in collecting so many fond memories, Clark has uncovered a whole stratum of the city who actually loved the building and clearly loved being there.