Gorillas in the House of Light

The Gorilla House at London Zoo was the first in a series of remarkable modernist zoo buildings to be built in Britain by Berthold Lubetkin in the 1930s. In this article his Gorilla House is considered in relation to the pioneering work on the significance of the 'Animal' in western philosophy initiated by Derrida. Lubetkin's modernist structure is seen to constitute an anthropocentric reinstating of the human order over the animal, a rearguard action against a culture-wide anxiety stemming from what Freud called humanity's second trauma, the threat to the foundations of humanist thought posed by Darwinian theory. This article contends that the anthropoid apes were a magnet for such fears from the moment of their discovery, and seeks to establish the precise nature of the menace that Lubetkin chose to place in this landmark of modernism, in this first 'House of Light'.