Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
modernist concern with zonation and functional efficiency was essential in the
treatment of communicable disease. Not only was air circulation modelled in order
to provide currents of fresh air and to expel foul air, as in the animals' enclosures,
but the circulation of the public (both well and unwell) and staff (both medical and
clerical) was modelled to provide clear and hygienic routeways. These design elements
were eventually expressed in the Finsbury Health Centre, commissioned by a
progressive Labour-controlled borough that also commissioned Tecton to build
working-class housing. Lubetkin produced a two-storey central axis with walls of glass
tiles, flanked by two wings that splayed out as if projecting open arms into the
borough. The Centre drew together the borough's previously scattered health
facilities into one functional building that was, in its essence, symbolic of good
health (see Gruffudd in press).
Many of Lubetkin's design elements were clearly exhibited in both the health and
zoo building. Both types were founded on detailed scientific and practical/functional
research. Both were committed to naturalism, in terms of fresh air and sunlight.
The same air-circulation technology was utilised, based on the same critical
understanding of the importance of hygiene. Some details were carried through
also: an innovative system of interlocking locker doors in the TB clinic and Finsbury
changing rooms was echoed in the design of the Gorilla House feeding cubicles, for
instance. Arguably, the biological cultivation for which the likes of Mumford called
was exhibited in pure form in the buildings designed by Tecton for London Zoo.
The cultivation of the perfect animal body in the enclosures stood not so much as a
metaphor
for,
as an experiment in, the cultivation of the perfect human body with
which so many modernists were concerned, and to which so much modernist
aesthetics alluded (see, e.g., Wigley 1995). The author of the
Mother and Child
article, doubtless alive to the need for effective nurturing, pointed simply but
powerfully to architectural modernism's new role in biology: '“Functionalism' is an
unattractive word, but it takes on a new meaning as applied to the penguin pool—
and to the Finsbury Health Centre' (
Mother and Child
1938:300).
Similarly, Huxley's evolutionary concerns can be traced in many of his other
planning- and architecture-related activities. 'Man'
(sic),
Huxley (1944b: x) argued,
must become consciously evolutionary, in his individual thinking, in his
collective outlook, and in his social machinery…. The implementation in
practice of even our existing knowledge concerning diet, disease, and positive
health will make sweeping alterations in effective human nature, the result of
which cannot be foretold: and the results of future discoveries in glandular
control, sex-determination and eugenics are still more unpredictable. The
techniques of large-scale over-all planning offer quite new possibilities of
controlling man's physical and social environment.
The TVA experiment represented one such attempt at integrating scientific
understanding with social improvement in an holistic fashion. In Huxley's narrative
of the TVA (1943), the principles of biological cultivation worked out in London
