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has a quality of work from which all superfluities have been eliminated by
intellectual labour'. Furthermore, the combination of lighting and the massing of
the building 'has led unconsciously to an elevation suggestive of the character of an
Elephant' (quoted in Huxley 1937b). However, the commission was later granted to
another firm amidst much acrimony as Huxley's relationship with the Zoological
Society deteriorated. Huxley was even moved to write to the Maharaja's Prime
Minister urging that the gift be withheld in the event of Tecton losing the
commission (Huxley 1944a). The more conservative members of the Council were
undoubtedly unappreciative of Tecton's modernity, but personal dislike of Huxley
seemed equally significant. The original drawings for the Gibbon House, for
instance, are annotated with the following note attributed to Lubetkin: 'Unexecuted;
backed by Julian Huxley, but (as tended to happen) this very fact put the Zoo
directors against it, since Huxley regarded by them as apt to be overbearing and too
little willing to discuss with them' (Drawing N40/28. London Zoo, Gibbon House,
c. 1933, Royal Institute of British Architects Drawing Collection).
Nonetheless, this collaboration between Lubetkin and Huxley reveals some of the
broader relevance of the zoo buildings in the culture of modernism. This can be
further exemplified by the work of the Architects and Technicians Organisation
(ATO), established in 1935 by Lubetkin and other Tecton members. One of its
main aims was the improvement of working-class housing, and, as Gold (1997)
demonstrates, the members' socialism informed their campaigning and their
prescriptions. Among the other members of ATO were scientists like J.B.S.
Haldane, Solly Zuckerman and Julian Huxley (Coe 1982). According to Allan
(1992:314), groups like the ATO 'must be seen within [a] wider spectrum of
analytical and agitational activity and be identified with the then radical consensus
that regarded centralised planning, with its assumed benign paternalism, as the key
instrument of social progress'. Science, of course, played a key role in that vision of
centralised planning, with the figure of the 'expert' to the fore. Huxley dedicated
himself to the social role of science, primarily through his interventions in eugenic
debates on nature versus nurture, but increasingly through a belief in the need for a
scientifically organised and planned society. In 1934 he published Scientific Research
and Social Needs, a powerful survey of scientific application to society in such wide-
ranging realms as food, building and health, as well as industry and war. Science, he
argued, was 'not the disembodied sort of activity that some people would make out,
engaged on the abstract task of pursuing universal truth, but a social function
intimately linked up with human history and human destiny' (Huxley 1934:279).
He also served on the 'think-tank' Political and Economic Planning in the 1930s
and the Hobhouse Committee on National Parks in the 1940s. The finest examples
of centralised planning were not, however, to be found in Britain. In A Scientist
Among the Soviets, published in 1932, Huxley recalled one vision of co-ordinated
planning—the Five-Year Plan—based on radical social and scientific principles: '[P]
roper planning is itself the application of scientific method to human affairs; and
also it demands for pure science a very large and special position in society' (Huxley
1932:52). Such vision was not limited to totalitarian states, though, and in TVA:
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