In Elen’s Bower: the ‘Druidic’ Temple Under the Tricorn

Modernism is not a style, it is a truth...
Rodney Gordon, Tricorn Architect

The Tricorn & Sacred Geometry

The Tricorn is a vast multi-storey complex on a triangular site in the centre of Portsmouth (UK). It was built in 1966, being designed by Owen Luder and Partners and built by Taylor Woodrow. A Late Modernist building made of concrete, it comprises a ground-level shopping precinct laid out in the form of narrow streets leading to a large central square. This was intended to echo the form of an Arab Casbah or old English country town. The function of the ground floor is as much social and psychological, as commercial. It is based on the notion that for the working classes in Britain the street represents a medium for communication: the street is "...the traditional playground for children and the only public space available for mass meetings and large scale sociability." (1) The building covers 4 acres of ground; the floor space is 12 acres. This spatial ‘tripling’ of a three sided building signifies the presence of ‘sacred geometry’ in the design.

The Tricorn also incorporated a multi-storey department store, offices, flats, two pubs, a night-club and a restaurant. In 1967 it won the Civic Trust Award for its "exciting visual composition." In 1968 it was voted Britain’s fourth ugliest building. Since then Taylor Woodrow have purchased the building they constructed, with the intention of demolishing it and developing the site for ‘Cascades 2’, a ‘seductive’ post-modern shopping centre. (2)

Conservation & Demolition

Leaflet Henge 1.JPG (29056 bytes)According to local tradition, the Tricorn was constructed on the site of an ancient ‘Druid’ temple; a Portsea Island equivalent of Stonehenge. (3) Far from destroying the henge site, the Tricorn - a building which embodies notions of social progression and (holy) trinity - is seen as protecting the hidden temple. "The earth on which sacred blood was spilled is there, under us." (4) It is considered bad luck to disturb the Tricorn site. Ill-fortune will visit the city if the building is knocked down. The plan to demolish the Tricorn - which has been beset by bad luck and delays - still exists. The intention of Taylor Woodrow to build Cascades 2 is widely expected to bring about the destruction of the city, "a calamity by sea" or "the return of the many dead to our streets." (5). As yet, the Tricorn cannot be profitably demolished. The cost of demolition, when set against the potential development value of the site, is too high. The Tricorn still defies the ‘cult of consumerism’.

Creating poetry out of brute matter

The presence of a ‘Neolithic’ ‘ritual landscape’ on Portsea Island has long been conjectured. Antiquarians such as Edward King (6) and Henry Rowlands (7) presented diagrams of sites which ‘appeared to disappear’. The apparent destruction of the fairy realm, and the occupation of those sites by commercial and military extensions of the state, have been documented since the first period of ‘the commodification of the Megaliths’ and the subsequent incorporation of wider landscapes into organised ‘space’. The development of ‘objective’ mapping techniques and the deployment of ‘Realism’ in art further beggared experienced and led to the construction of property and, by extension, of ‘places’. As subjectivity, along with tradition, was invalidated, so the rights of non-property owners were constructed as ‘absent’. Jonathon Meades, in his groundbreaking utilitarian survey of Portsea Island (8), explored the alignments that still exist between aspects of ‘identity’, ‘landscape’ and the ‘linear’ construction of ‘time’, which he argued to be an ontological construct, born of capitalism, designed to create feelings of obsolescence in commodified identities, leading to the cult of youth, the marginalisation of older people and a further ‘erosion’ of traditions, both in terms of how these related to ‘rights’ and to topography.

Creating matter out of brute poetry

Nennius, underpinning an entire philosophy, created prosaic catalogues of generic landforms - a kind of pattern book of landscape construction techniques - from which the name and genre of ‘Brutalism’ can be traced. He listed the main tenets of early Brutalism; a focus on materials in their natural state; ‘space’ as ‘quality’; a hostility to ornamentation; the presence of ‘a machine metaphor’ (typically - in the case of henges - relating to eclipse prediction and ‘Victory Over Death’); the unification of shape and form, of interior and exterior; an emphasis on function; the construction of a ‘universal’ style, of a "new plastic language" (9); the unification of society under a fixed or monumental ideology; the translation of ‘truth’ into ‘beauty’; exaggerated abstraction. He stated that "an object’s durability should be parallel to the time it lasts in physical terms."

Leaflet Henge 2 web.JPG (27142 bytes)The henges and stone circles of the late Stone Age and Neolithic periods were designed as ‘machines for living’. They ‘simultaneously’ negated the class differences inherent in society and consolidated - in massive blocks of stone - the social power of a tiny elite of architects, poets and shaman-priests. "The henge builders acquired the intellectual and emotional bias for a practical functional approach to design. This could also be called a form of ideological control... hegemony and infrastructure were manipulated and used as a tool to define an intended society." (10)

The journey into contradiction, the path that would eventually lead to dualism, the science of dialectics and the separation of the material and spiritual realms, had begun. ‘Unity of being’ was fractured within the process of its realisation. This was where Eden once was, and how it ended. It rests beneath the Tricorn now, under a symbol of the trinity, until it is opened and destroyed.

Power & Proportion

In a post-industrial Portsmouth, with the translation of cosmopolitan values into insularity, the modernists fought a rearguard action, attempting to create - at the heart of Portsea Island’s sacred landscape - a single, architectural structure that channelled the unity of being envisaged by the Neolithic hierarchs into an image that simultaneously represented the identity of Portsmouth and the cosmopolitan or internationalist ideology which had been all but destroyed and (as Ludor pointed out) ironically emphasised by the second world war. Ludor, existing outside of time, as the ‘mythical ‘British’ King Ludor Rous Hudibrass and as Owen Ludor (an ‘architect trapped in a man’s body’), completed his project to "recapitulate futurity, within linear time" in 1966. The Tricorn - the "tight Kissing Dress" of Portsmouth’s transvestites - was raised to contain the ‘earth energies’ of the ancient henge which still exists below the concrete erection and, cutting across ‘barriers’ of ‘space’ and ‘time’, to import atmospheres from outside of the city (and thus from off the island) along sacred spirit paths, which some call ‘ley’ ‘lines’. From Hilda’s Low to the Triangle at Hilsea; from St. Catherine’s Hill to the Old Padded Mound; "the Tricorn does take the fun out of shopping." (Le Corbusier)

The pure geometry of the circle is represented as a triangle. The universe is a three sided girl: Angry, Inclusive and Proud.

 

Notes:

1 The New Brutalist, Rayner Banhan, page 142, para 2.
2 The Cascades Centre, a foil to the otherworldly Tricorn, was completed some years ago as an extension to Portsmouth’s Commercial Road.
3 Antiquaries of the 17th and 18th centuries were convinced that such monuments as ‘henges’ were built by Druids, although it is now thought likely they were constructed by utopian communists, from 2500 BC onwards.
4 Local trader, Charlotte Street market, Portsmouth. The open air market exists in the shadow of the Tricorn. Charlotte Street partly overlays the sanctuary of the ‘Druid temple’.
5 (ibid.) Both quotes.
6 Munimenta Antquaria, 1799.
7 Mona Antiqua Restaurata, 1723.
8 Meades, History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Portsmouth,1952
9 Le Corbusier, The Tragic View of Architecture, Charles Jencks, page 137, para 1.
10 Meades, History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Portsmouth,1952

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INDEX