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Zoological Society at London Zoo in Regent's Park. But these buildings, as Allan
(1992) notes, gave the British mass public its first taste of modern architecture, and
they were an instant and unqualified success. They also received critical acclaim.
The commissions originated with Solly Zuckerman, a Research Anatomist with the
Zoological Society from 1928 and Demonstrator at University College London. He
recommended to Dr Geoffrey Vevers, the Zoo's superintendent, and Sir Peter
Chalmers-Mitchell, Secretary of the Zoological Society, both socialists (like
Lubetkin), that the Tecton firm might be offered the commission for designing a
home for two young gorillas newly acquired from the Belgian Congo. The proposal
was accepted, but Chalmers-Mitchell imposed a deadline for the design stage of
merely four days. Recalling his thoughts on the design process, Lubetkin wrote:
There are two possible methods of approach to the problem of zoo design; the
first, which may be called the 'naturalistic' method, is typified in the
Hamburg and Paris zoos, where an attempt is made, as far as possible, to
reproduce the natural habitat of each animal; the second approach, which, for
want of a better word, we may call the 'geometric', consists of designing
architectural settings for the animals in such a way as to present them
dramatically to the public, in an atmosphere comparable to that of a circus.
(In Allan 1992:199)
The 'naturalistic' approach, in which animals were presented in cages or enclosures
that made some gesture to their native habitat, predominated in Europe at this
time, accounting for the last major building project in London Zoo—the Mappin
Terraces, completed some twenty years earlier. Lubetkin rejected this fake naturalism
or tokenism (see Berger 1980), however, and adopted the geometrical approach in his
designs. This was, in part, pragmatic. One of the zoo's functions was, he claimed,
entertainment; a naturalistic enclosure allowed shy animals to hide but also failed to
provide the more extrovert the stage on which to perform. The architect's task was
to understand the animal in its essence, and then to coax it through design to
display its distinctive characteristics. (Form follows function, as it were.) But the
designs were also ideological. Lubetkin's work was based on a philosophical
understanding in which humans were seen as highly evolved biological organisms in
some senses set apart from nature. So, while Lubetkin demonstrated a real fondness
for animals, it was within a clearly expressed hierarchy where humans were the
rational superior. When Lubetkin later became a Cotswold pig-farmer, for instance,
he accepted giraffe and elephant 'evacuees' onto his farm during wartime, but
equally gave his pigs numbers rather than names (Gardiner 1987). Lubetkin's zoo
enclosures are unequivocally modernist in that they affirm the power of the human
mind to alter environment through geometry; but they are also honest in that they
place that power within a nexus of rights and responsibilities. As Allan puts it,
Lubetkin's zoo approach rejected both camouflage and conquest as metaphors of
human intervention in nature. Human instrumentality was to be both explicit
and
benign: 'nature tamed—not with a fist, but with a smile' (Allan 1992:201).
