Not a Penguin Pool: Echoes of More-than-Human Entanglements

This spring, a team of researchers were invited by the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation to explore the 1934 Penguin Pool at the London Zoo, built by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton group in collaboration with Ove Arup. In the years since its construction, the enclosure has been well celebrated for its iconic architecture, and well critiqued for its inadequacy in housing penguins, the last of which were removed in 2004. There is no such thing as a good design for a cage.

After praise and after critique, at the center of the bustling zoo, the quiet enclosure remains a darkly and comically alluring ghost. The research team entered the pool and its archives here, to notice, reflect and share subjective readings. The resulting exhibition revisits the Penguin Pool’s implication in a spectrum of theoretical, biological, and cultural phenomena, between architecture, historiography, and more-than-human entanglements. These many ways of knowing the pool are expressed in archival artefacts, texts, visual art and somatic practice. The work takes collective form over a one-to-one scale transfiguration of the enclosure, installed in the former metal workshop in the Bauhaus Building, becoming a resonant space for multiple conversations with the Penguin Pool and its far-reaching geographies between the Zoo in London, the site of the exhibition in the Bauhaus Dessau, the Antarctic habitats the pool has taken from, and beyond.

A symposium will also take place to mark the end of this year’s Bauhaus Lab, towards unsettling the monumentality of the Penguin Pool. The invited guests and programme participants will discuss the pool from a variety of perspectives, aiming to illuminate some of the epistemologies, materialities and legacies of modernist logics of inhabitation at the Penguin Pool, and to slip past them.

Not a Penguin Pool: Echoes of More-than-Human Entanglements is a collective work developed by an international group of invited artists, architects, curators, and researchers in the framework of the 2023 edition of the Bauhaus Lab programme in Global Modernism Studies. The Bauhaus Lab 2023 participants are: Andrea Palášti, Daniella Camarena, Julieta Pestarino, Nicolás Penna, Patricia Roig Canepa, Sarah Kantrowitz, and Yujia Bian, supported by Regina Bittner and Philipp Sack (Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation).

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is a non-profit foundation under public law.