Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West. (Rattling Cages).

Eric Baratay & Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. London: Reaktion Books. 2002. [pounds sterling]28.00

This is not a book about architecture; it is rather about man's treatment of animals in captivity in the Western world; in the words of the authors -- two historians at Lyons (this book was originally published in French in 1998) --'To tour the cages of a zoo is to understand the society that erected them'. It is, however, a book full of architecture -- quite extraordinarily varied and peculiar buildings of a sort only to be found in the zoological gardens of European cities, represented in a most generous offering of witty and carefully chosen illustrations which complement the main text and range from early prints and nineteenth-century postcards to modern photographs. Here are all those structures in exotic styles which, in the nineteenth century, were thought appropriate as the home of wild creatures from foreign parts: the Egyptian temple in Antwerp Zoo, the Indian pagoda for elephants in Berlin, the Jugendstil buildings at Budapest ornamented with carved animals, the Turkish elephant house at Basel, the Swiss cottages in Regent's Park. Then there are the extraordinary artificial mountains of concrete, like the Mappin Terraces in London, and -- in reaction -- those famous abstract geometrical structures by Lubetkin in Regent's Park, Whipsnade and Dudley.

Concrete, indeed -- easy both to build and to wash down -- seems to have been inflicted on animals for their habitat before it was tried out on humans needing shelter. This book, indeed, is really the story of man's uncomprehending exploitation of and cruelty to animals, tempered by the hypocritical delusion that their true characters in nature can ever be appreciated in captivity. The first modern zoo, succeeding the royal and aristocratic menageries, was the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, founded in 1793. Stocked with creatures seized by the Revolutionary armies from all over Europe (a sort of zoological Louvre) it was, significantly, laid out like a Picturesque park -- a Rousseauesque semblance of Nature -- while the buildings themselves housed caged animals as if in museum display cabinets. Only later, and partly to keep solvent, did zoos become places of popular entertainment. The story is one of zoo buildings and parks changing to give an impression of apparent liberty; as the authors observe, 'While cage d animals, imprisoned and diminished, provoke mockery, species in semi-liberty retain their dignity and arouse interest'. Today, in our sentimental idealistic anti-zoo culture, the confined animal cages of the past seem barbaric, but the telling point is made that such accommodation was once regarded as tolerable as it reflected contemporary human experience. Why should lions have been better housed than most people?

A short notice cannot do justice to this admirable and thought-provoking book. As the author concludes: 'The zoological garden has shared, and continues to share, all the doubts and contradictions of Western society's relationship with the rest of the world.'