Peacock and Basking Lizards, Zoo Rockwork Enclosure, 1960s

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Peacock and Basking Lizards, Zoo Rockwork Enclosure, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Peacock and Basking Lizards, Zoo Rockwork Enclosure, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-E62DAE

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Zoo architects in the 1960s had one great faith: that a coat of tinted concrete, molded into a boulder shape and left in the sun, would convince both visitors and animals that they were looking at genuine geology. The lizards sprawled across its ridge seem to have accepted the arrangement without complaint, each one angled toward the light with the unbothered confidence of a creature that has never once questioned whether its rock is real.

The peacock was not invited into this shot and does not care. Free-roaming peafowl were a standard flourish of mid-century zoo design, let loose to wander between enclosures on the theory that a little unscripted grandeur made the whole park feel more like an estate than an institution. Here one has simply parked itself in front of the reptile display, tail thrown into full, gratuitous spread, upstaging an exhibit that took considerably more labor to build than it did to decorate.

Somewhere behind the thatch-topped wall a keeper had almost certainly planned the sightlines with some care, arranging animals to be seen in sequence, rock before bird. Nature, characteristically, declined to follow the floor plan.

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