Virtually unnoticed, however, is an aspect of the plan that will generate many more homes for New Yorkers of all incomes: a major revision of the city's archaic building code and zoning laws.
Cavetto cornices at the tops of walls, for instance, were made to imitate rows of palm fronds placed atop archaic walls, and the batter of exterior walls, while partly meant to ensure stability, was also a holdover from archaic building methods.
The great archaic sandstone building blocks used by the Badami Chalukyas were superseded with smaller blocks of soapstone and with smaller masonry.
And yet again, the Brokpas may need to apply the archaic solution of building stone walls and wooden fences.
Even tougher, Ms. Yamamoto said, would be the labor involved in grafting the system onto the city's existing archaic reservation network or building a new one from scratch.
"The details are deliberately quite primitive," says project architect John O'Mara, describing how the material junctions of brick, concrete and oak are simply expressed as "essential acts of assembly", in line with the building's archaic, primal form.
Mortimer's work at Ludlow was probably intended to produce what the historian David Whitehead has termed a "show castle" with chivalric and Arthurian overtones, echoing the now archaic Norman styles of building.
Building is "very archaic still, and we've gone back to more archaic stuff – gravity, smell, finding roots, not giving pictures, fake images or illusions that you can get on the internet".
Of a different order are the spectacular finds from the site of Poggio Civitate (Murlo) near Siena, where excavations (begun in 1966) have revealed a huge building of the Archaic period with rammed earth walls, measuring about 197 feet on each side and featuring a large court in the middle.
Mendes da Rocha's buildings have an archaic, almost primal air, with huge fins of concrete possessing a raw, visceral roughness.
The Late Archaic sees the first indication of mound building in Iowa, as well as direct evidence of domesticated plants, and large, long-term settlements.
