Stephen Gardiner Quotes

In the Scottish Orkneys, the little stone houses with their single large room and central hearth had an extraordinary range of built-in furniture.

Land is the secure ground of home, the sea is like life, the outside, the unknown.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

The Egyptian tomb was the outcome of the Mesopotamian influence and followed from the religious crisis the country had undergone.

The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

Houses mean a creation, something new, a shelter freed from the idea of a cave.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again.

The interior of the house personifies the private world; the exterior of it is part of the outside world.

The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.

People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish.

Newton, for instance, attempted to comprehend the diversities of the universe with a single system of mathematical laws, the objectivity, sobriety and logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which, while accepting variations and adjustments according to climate and other needs, could be applied universally.

The Romans used every housing form known today and they have a remarkably modern look.

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

Up until the War of the Roses there had been continual conflict in England.

In Japanese houses the interior melts into the gardens of the outside world.

The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.

The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition.

And so, inevitably, one returns to the centre of Western culture, Greece, and we have never, in any sense, lost our ties with the architectural concepts that this country's ancient civilization explored and demonstrated, nor with the political and social freedom that lay behind them.

The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.

It is hardly surprising that the Georgian domestic style emerges as the most remarkable in the world.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden

It was only from an inner calm that man was able to discover and shape calm surroundings.

In the East there is a gap between the top of the wall and the underside of the roof; the wall does not act as a support. Instead, it acts as a screen, and the Chinese were able to use it as they wished.

The corridor is hardly ever found in small houses, apart from the verandah, which also serves as a corridor.

The American order reveals a method that was largely the outcome of material necessity, as exemplified by the Colonial style and the grid.

What people want, above all, is order.

It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process.

The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.

The mandala describes balance. This is so whatever the pictorial form.

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.

Stonehenge was built possibly by the Minoans. It presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.