Stephen Gardiner

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

The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.

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

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

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

In the crowded and difficult conditions of a steep hillside, houses have had to struggle to establish their territory and to survive.

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

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

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

The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.

Like flats of today, terraces of houses gained a certain anonymity from identical facades following identical floor plans and heights.

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 a wall and underside of a roof; it acts as a screen, and the Chinese were able to use it as they wished.

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

The exterior cannot do without the interior since it is from this, as from life, that it derives much of its inspiration and character.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

In Japanese art, space assumed a dominant role and its position was strengthened by Zen concepts.

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

The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

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

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.

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

Good buildings come from good people, ad all problems are solved by good design.

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

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

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

What people want, above all, is order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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