Owen Luder

The now-demolished Tricorn Centre.

Owen Luder, CBE (born 7 August 1928) is an English architect who designed a number of notable and sometimes controversial buildings in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s, many now demolished. He is a former chairman of the Architects Registration Board and president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He established his own practice Owen Luder Partnership in 1957, and left in 1987 to form the consultancy Communication In Construction.

Owen Luder's designs included some of the most powerful and raw examples of Brutalist architecture, with massive bare concrete sculptural forms devoid of claddings or decoration - other than their inherent shapes. The British climate, with abundant rain and damp winters, is unkind to such unclad concrete buildings which rapidly become a shabby grey–brown colour and streaked with marks where rainwater has run down the façades. Poor maintenance has often exacerbated these problems.

Some of the Owen Luder Partnership's best known buildings are the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, Derwent Tower in Gateshead and Catford shopping centre in London, which is being considered for demolition.^[1] Trinity Square in Gateshead (whose multi-storey car park featured in the 1971 gangster movie Get Carter) was another one of the practice's major schemes, demolition of which began in January 2009. Luder also designed the much-derided Southgate shopping centre in Bath, Somerset, which has recently been demolished to make way for a new multimillion-pound development.

Despite receiving awards when built, the Tricorn Centre was voted the third ugliest building in Britain and was demolished in 2004 to mixed reactions and protests from an unrepentant Luder. The Trinity Square car park has also been subject to a number of redevelopment proposals and featured in the Channel 4 series Demolition in 2005. Luder featured in the 2005 BBC Radio 3 broadcast 'Gateshead Multi-Storey Car Park'. A radiophonic tribute to Trinity Square, produced by Langham Research Centre, the programme was made entirely from the sounds of the carpark, processed and treated on quarter-inch tape.^[2]

Luder also designed the conversion of a Victorian fire station into the South London Theatre in 1967. In addition he designed a number of small houses in the borough of Lambeth including 26-28 Groveway (1953) and 76-78 Herne Hill Road (1954), one of the latter was occupied by Luder upon completion.^[3]

Trinity Square in Gateshead is now demolished,^[4] and Derwent Tower demolished in 2012.^[5] The Catford Centre, Luder's last surviving town centre of the Tricorn type, was purchased by the local council in 2010 for "regeneration", which may involve demolition of the housing on the site. Roxby House in Sidcup survives as an example of his later work.

See also

• Rodney Gordon, design director at Owen Luder Partnership^[6]

References