Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Biological cultivation
Lubetkin's modernism at London Zoo in the 1930s
Pyrs Gruffudd
Introduction
The most famous zoo structures in Britain are probably the modernist Penguin Pool
and Gorilla House built in London Zoo in the 1930s by the Tecton firm led by
Berthold Lubetkin. These buildings were the product, in part, of stylistic
experimentation led by a radical intelligentsia—the sort of experimentation that
elsewhere led to the construction of modernist villas or apartment dwellings. They
therefore signified the absorption of London Zoo into a new aesthetic and cultural
context. But arguably, and more importantly, a new fusion of social and political
radicalism, on the one hand, and popular science, on the other, was the driving
force behind the emergence of zoo modernism. In this sense, London Zoo was a
symbol of the contemporary concern for 'planning' and for a reformed relationship
between humanity and nature. While the stylistics of modernism appeared to place
it at an intellectual distance from nature, closer study of the projects reveal that
these buildings emerged from a new theorisation of the natural world and the
efficient nurture of life. This chapter considers the structures built at London Zoo,
alongside Tecton's other contemporary projects, not as attempts to dominate or to
transcend nature but as experiments in harmonising living creatures and their
designed spaces through the medium of a scientifically informed modernism. While
the creatures in London Zoo were obviously non-human, they were nonetheless
considered as indicators of humanity's fate, and the Zoo enclosures were widely read
as symbolising deficiencies and new hopes for a humane, and human, urban
planning.
Writing about the Adelaide Zoo, Anderson (1995:276) argues that
zoos ultimately tell us stories about boundary-making activities on the part of
humans. In the most general terms, Western metropolitan zoos are spaces
where humans engage in cultural self-definition against a variably constructed
and opposed nature. With animals as the medium, they inscribe a cultural sense
of distance from that loosely defined realm that has come to be called
'nature'.
