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

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

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

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

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

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.

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