“The notion of the common plan persists today in the term Bauplan, from the German meaning ground plan or an architects sketch or plan (Bau, design, type of construction, structure, form; plan, plan, design, intention), which was introduced into morphology in 1945 by Joseph Henry Woodger (1894-1981). Although more or less assimilated into biology, the term has not been incorporated into general use outside of science…”
–Brian K. Hall Evolutionary Developmental Biology

“De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of houses. A row of houses he regards as a row of necessary evils. The softening and degeneration of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning interest in the art of going out and staying there. This in turn he sees as the result of the rise of such pursuits as reading, chess-playing, drinking, marriage and the like, few of which can be satisfactorily conducted in the open. Elsewhere he defines a house as ‘a large coffin’, ‘a warren’, and ‘a box’. Evidently his main objection was to the confinement of a roof and four walls. He ascribed somewhat far-fetched therapeutic values–chiefly pulmonary–to certain structures of his own design which he called ‘habitats’, crude drawings of which may still be seen in the pages of the Country Album. These structures were of two kinds, roofless ‘houses’ and ‘houses’ without walls. The former had wide open doors and windows with an extremely ungainly superstructure of tarpaulins loosely rolled on spars against bad weather–the whole looking like a foundered sailing-ship erected on a platform of masonry and the last place where one would think of keeping even cattle.”
–Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman pg. 21

“What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on – but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.”
–Tom McCarthy “Stabbing the Olive” London Review of Books, 11 February 2010

“In the museum of the Château de Rueil-Malmaison there once stood–and still may still–what the faded postcard lent to me by a friend identifies in three languages as the “frock coat and hat of the Emperor.” The card displays the familiar black shape seen on the emperor’s head in endless battle scenes and cognac ads on a sumptuous scarlet ground above a long gray double-breasted coat. The hat recalls the ones worn by Franco’s Guardia Civil, except that here it’s flipped hiphop back to front. The hat and coat float weightlessly: the stub of the display form pokes through where the empreror’s neck once did, never touching the hat, and where the stand should replace the emperor’s legs, the coat shows now visible means of support. These flat contradictions of the law of physics and representation involuntarily recalle for me the marvelous illusions of Méliès: a still from some lost version of The Inn where no man rests. This paradoxical effect may be the result of some deft erasures, or perhaps only of the mechanical wear of the printing plates, for the card has been run so many times its softened contours give as much the appearance of a drawing as a photograph.”
–Keith Sanborn “Postcards from the Berezina” Napoleon How to Make War pg.79