TRICORNIA

"...brutalism has passed its nadir and its star is rising. But not in Portsmouth."

Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian, 21/07/97

The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth - a beautiful building with many ugly critics (including ‘prince’ Charles) - is to be demolished by Taylor Woodrow early in 1998. They plan to build a narcotic/reflective consumerist structure in its place. This action is synonymous with the destruction of Glastonbury Abbey by the Tudors, who sought to widen the newly developing bourgeoisie in order to replace ‘universality’ with petty ‘materialism’, as a fore-runner of ‘English’ nationalism, in the minds of the new elite. The geometry of these buildings ‘contained’ the universe in how they re-presented concepts of both (inter-)dimensionality and communality. "Authority thus replaces a mediated ‘paradise’ with mediated Capital... the hierarchy of heaven for the heaven of hierarchy." From omphalos to heritage site, from cathedral of being - an active ontology - to economics-as-mirror, within which we are vanishing. "We have suffered set-backs in our attempts to transfigure the way in which the Tricorn Centre is perceived, both in terms of its aspect as victim (or sacred fool) and in terms of the spectacular betrayal of the psychic realm, of the Triple Goddess herself," said Dr Mintern, "but we shall return and take this building into our Eutopia." Even as this act of sacrilege is being planned Late Modernist architecture everywhere is being ‘rehabilitated’ from mute matter into text (‘into’ culture, which is a different mode of consciousness to that constructed within loathing).