Little by little I constructed a world; a new London emerging like a white bubonic plague from the comfortable shambles of the old. I settled for my model on the Russian architect Lubetkin, who designed the old penguin enclosure at London Zoo. His geometric structures were beautiful but hard, a mathematical absolutism that demanded people play by machinic rules, rather than softening the edges of the razor to allow biology and culture their place. Indeed, the penguins have for some time inhabited a more organic setting, leaving the brutalist post-deco pit near the aardvarks a monument to the temporary triumph of theory over life.