Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Zoo were reflected on a grander scale. He typically wove together the same close
understandings of biological systems (soil, flora and fauna, water-bodies, human
health), of modernist design and technology, and of the importance of community
and of social and regional planning through science.
On a more local scale, the application of evolutionary theory and modernist
design to health was also a feature of Huxley's activities. He was a member of the
steering committee of the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham. This was an
experiment in family, community and health that was also, significantly, housed—
from 1935 onwards—in a landmark modernist building (this time designed by
Owen Williams), and was explicit in its adoption of biological and evolutionary
thinking on the human body, the family and urban space (Gruffudd 1995).
Drawing on the example of the Mexican
axylotl
(the tadpole stage of the
salamander), the Centre's directors stressed the importance of environment in
nurturing the full potential of any living organism. The Centre's aim was, through a
building of steel and glass, to provide a healthful environment involving well-
designed physical spaces as well as contact with nature's benefits through natural
foods, alongside a healthy social environment—what they called the 'social soil'
(Pearse and Crocker 1943). Huxley was active in his support of the Centre, making
several widely reported speeches on its behalf and using it as an example of his ideal,
scientifically-led social science for campaigns on health-funding and on dietary
improvement. In the arena of dietary improvement—as in that of environment and
design—the treatment of animals could nonetheless still be viewed as an ironic
statement on the neglect of humans. An article in the
Daily Herald
(1937) on the
need for national nutritional standards showed a composite photograph of a
chimpanzee and two children standing behind a montage of the healthy fresh foods
that constituted a typical week's intake for the chimp. Yet, it quoted Julian Huxley
as saying that, '[i]f we gave the gorillas and chimpanzees a diet like that actually
eaten by millions of human beings in this country we should be rightly blamed for
not keeping them in proper condition.'
Conclusion
There is an irony in the
Architects' Journal's
illustration of 'The descent of man' as a
return to the animal stage of hygiene while the animals achieve a new cleanliness. It
is clear that, although Lubetkin certainly believed in the power of the rational
human mind to modify nature, he believed that it should do so on the basis of a
theoretical and biological understanding of the connections and duties between the
human and non-human world. There was a significant degree of environmental
humility in his treatment of animals, despite appearances. Furthermore, that
understanding of nature—culture relationships, of organisms evolving in their
respective environments, was—for the likes of Huxley—part of the key to a larger-
scale reorientation of human society through planning. More than mere analogy or
metaphor, evolution or 'biotechnics', as Mumford might have called it, was a
technique to be employed in theory, analysis and, ultimately, design and planning.
