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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
Lubetkin's first building in Britain: a concrete drum, half of it open, with a screen that revolved to shut the winter out.
Modern movement
Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton built it in 1932-33 with Ove Arup, their first significant commission and their first for the Zoological Society, and Historic England calls it a seminal Modern Movement building in Britain - the first time the highly technical, quasi-scientific Tecton method was applied to a real brief.
The plan is a drum and everything follows from it. Half the circle was an open cage; the other half a permanent one lit by a clerestory; the entrance and exit wings sweep away from the rim as part of the composition rather than stuck on it. Four inches of reinforced concrete, steel bars, sliding glass inner windows.
The clever part was the winter. An insulated screen, stored through the summer inside the permanent half of the drum, revolved out to close the open cage, giving the public a sheltered place to stand and letting glass windows rise in the dividing wall so that air conditioning could hold Congo conditions inside. The screen pivots on ball bearings in a solid steel column and is carried at its outer edge on rollers running in a steel channel round the top.
It has not held gorillas for a long time and is called the Round House now, with smaller animals in it. The building is what you go to look at.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.