Stephen Gardiner Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

What people want, above all, is order.

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

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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