ABSTRACT
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.
