Peter Carey in the book Thirty Days in Sydney writes of a timely reading of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, when he was about to go and meet his old friend, the architect Jack Ledoux.

De Selby, the sage in the story – 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 of the human race he attributes to progressive predilection for interiors and waning in the art of going out and staying there. Elsewhere he defines the house as a ‘large coffin’, a ‘warren’, and a ‘box’. Evidently his main objection was the confinement of a roof and four walls. I was laughing out loud as Flann O’Brien, writing in a gloomy Dublin winter, magically, exactly, uncannily, predicted Jack Ledoux’s architectural approach to life in sub-tropical Sydney.