After being faced with ‘the horrible dangers of war’, the French Huguenot potter and engineer Bernard Palissy worked to come up with a design for a fortress city. Uninspired by existing architecture, he journeyed through woods and mountains, ‘to see whether I could find some industrious animal which might give me a hint for my design’. While searching for inspiration he was brought two shells from Guinea – a murex and a whelk. Noting that the more fragile of the two, the murex, had a number of sharp spikes around its edges, Palissy decided that ‘God has bestowed more industry upon the weak creatures than on the strong’, and that ‘the many bulwarks and defences for the fortress … make compensation for its weakness’. It was this creature, rather than the more robust whelk, that became the model for his fortress design.

Several centuries later, after facing horrible dangers as an artillery officer and war artist at the Western Front, Wyndham Lewis published his first pamphlet, The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where Is Your Vortex?(1919). It begins with a parable of an Eastern ruler who summons his architects, informing them: ‘I am extremely dissatisfied with the shape of my city, so I have done a design of a new city’ (CD19). By now it was clear that Lewis’s ‘puce-coloured cockle-shell’ BLASThad failed to ‘brave the waves of blood’ and ‘reach the other side of World-War’ as the author had hoped it would in 1915, and now a new artistic fortification was required. In the aftermath of the war, Lewis sought inspiration from another kind of ‘industrious animal’ encased within a protective shell – one whose vulnerability to predators has led to the development of defensive strategies, as the biologist Edward Poulton puts it, ‘in number and fidelity of detail unequalled throughout organic nature’.