"A parchment book lost in the Thames was recently recovered completely intact. 'Water simply strengthens parchment, unlike paper. That is why several books have survived for more than a thousand years.' says Wim Visscher whose family have been making parchment and vellum since 1860." Including restoration of the Doomesday Book. R.U., "Living National Treasure: Parchment Maker" Country Life (November 24, 1994), p. 32-33.
Auckland architect David Mitchell is one of these. He scorns Post-Modern architecture for this reason; for its entertaining the 2-D surface as a key design element: "In 1980 Michael Graves had rendered the facade of the Public Service Building in Portland, US as a gigantic neoclassical collage barely related functionally to what was behind it. In one stroke he had granted a licence to reduce 3-D architecture to 2-D scenography." David Mitchell, "Urban Decline" Architecture New Zealand (January/February, 1995), p. 50-52.
"The richness and variety of the English school of landscape painters has resulted from the constant conflict between realism and poetry." Laure Meyer, Masters of English Landscape (Paris: Pierre Terrail, 1993), dustcover.
Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: the idea of the primitive hut in architectural history (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), Mark Wigley writes: "The invisible architecture of the crypt is always bound to a visible architecture ... Furthermore, there is no architecture without crypt." The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1993), p. 179.
"Life, real life, was physical. To live was to dig, hack, hit, shove, sail, swim, kick." K. Sinclair, "Life in the Provinces: The European Settlement" Distance Looks our way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1961), p. 41.
Robert Creeley, "Joy" The Finger. Poems 1966-1969 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), p. 23.
Whilst holes in the ground are included as part of the origins of architecture by some writers they are not dwelt upon e.g. Vitruvius, who mentions "others dug caves on mountain sides" and notes the trenches dug by Phrygians who lived in open country. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture trans. M. H. Morgan, (New: York: Dover, 1960), p. 39-40. Sir William Chambers writing in the 1750's dismisses such holes and other early devices as soon abandoned on account of their being "disgusting, damp and dark" Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise p. 70.
Lewis Mumford emphasizes the Paleolithic cave sanctuary in the social development of place in The City in History: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961).
In Australia near Canberra I once saw a kangaroo, a large male, established in a hole it must have shaped for itself; he had his rear limbs and soft parts snug in the hole with his powerful 'mastaba' tail on the brink at the ready. His squeaky nose, eyes, and ears were lifted high like the communications masts on the mountain tops around Canberra's moist hollow.
"Tiger! Tiger! Mowgli's Song" Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: MacMillan, 1st ed 1894).
"Every apparently stable building presupposes such a concealed and unstable spacing that is itself a mechanism of concealment," "but of seeing what it might say about such a hiding, seeing what it reveals about concealment, what it opens about closure, and so on. In the end, these are the architectural questions." Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction p. 179, 88.
An example is R.H.Toy's All Saints' Church, (1957) Ponsonby, Auckland. P. Shaw, New Zealand Architecture (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), p. 153. More extreme examples by Le Corbusier are Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55) and the Church of S. Marie-de-la-Tourette (1957-60). Also the Fosse Ardeatine, (1945) Rome by Aprile et al G.E. Kiddersmith, Italy Builds (London: The Architectural Press, 1956), p. 174-177.
William Mason's Old Government House (1856) Auckland, now the University of Auckland Senior Common Room, has all these sense cues, visual, olefactory, auditory worked in relief plaster as an interior frieze; Apollo/Orpheus lyres alternate with garlands of fruit and flowers with ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Shaw, New Zealand Architecture p. 34. Recent truncation of the ribbons on Auckland University's crest, in order to merely make them less ornate, is an act of ignorance. Once like the pennons at Thebes, stirring in the air of the God Amon the Invisible One, Auckland University's ribbons now indicate that the University has become an airless overcrowded zone.
Egypt also introduced the concept of a building within a building as in Tutankhamun's concentric shrines whereby each, shorter than the one over it, provides a ventilating strip as a kheker frieze; and whereby solid interior walls are painted as the elevations of an airy pavilion. Auckland graduate Robert Tse has recently located in China his family's ancestral hall in which a strip of painted landscape is placed in exactly this frieze zone. Robert Tse, "On the way to Ha Leung," (BArch thesis: University of Auckland, 1994).
"A clear division into base, middle and top was made." 'Citibank Centre, 23 Customs Street, Auckland.' Warren and Mahoney Architects 1958-1989 (Christchurch: Warren and Mahoney, 1989), p. 93.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture ed. Michael W. Meister, (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Oxford University Press, 1992.)
Michael W. Meister and Joseph Rykwert, "Afterword: Adam's house and hermits' huts, A conversation," Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture
Ferry Building, (1912), Quay Street, Auckland. Architect Alexander Wiseman, in Shaw, New Zealand Architecture p. 70.
"at the first sign of dawn he was up, and hurried off to the lion pit. As he approached the pit he shouted in anguished tones, 'Daniel, servant of the living God! Has your God, whom you serve so faithfully, been able to save you from the lions?' Daniel replied, 'O King, live for ever! My God sent his angel who sealed the lions' jaws, they did me no harm, since in his sight I am blameless, and I have never done you any wrong either, O King.' The King was overjoyed, and ordered Daniel to be released from the pit. Daniel was released from the pit, and found to be quite unhurt, because he had trusted in his God. The King sent for the men who had accused Daniel and had them thrown into the lion pit, they, their wives and their children: and they had not reached the floor of the pit before the lions had seized them and crushed their bones to pieces." "Daniel" 6.17-25 The Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966).