Quotes by Stephen Gardiner

• The Romans used every housing form known today and they have a remarkably modern look.
• In Japanese art, space assumed a dominant role and its position was strengthened by Zen concepts.
• In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.
• In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.
• Human requirements are the inspiration for art.
• Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.
• Good buildings come from good people, ad all problems are solved by good design.
• French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.
• Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.
• The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.
• The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.
• What people want, above all, is order.
• 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.
• Up until the War of the Roses there had been continual conflict in England.
• The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition.
• The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.
• The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.
• The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.
• The corridor is hardly ever found in small houses, apart from the verandah, which also serves as a corridor.
• 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.
• The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
• The exterior cannot do without the interior since it is from this, as from life, that it derives much of its inspiration and character.
• The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.
• The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again.
• The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.
• The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.
• In Japanese houses the interior melts into the gardens of the outside world.
• The interior of the house personifies the private world; the exterior of it is part of the outside world.
• In the crowded and difficult conditions of a steep hillside, houses have had to struggle to establish their territory and to survive.
• The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.
• The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.
• The American order reveals a method that was largely the outcome of material necessity, as exemplified by the Colonial style and the grid.
• Stonehenge was built possibly by the Minoans. It presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.
• People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish.
• Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.
• Like flats of today, terraces of houses gained a certain anonymity from identical facades following identical floor plans and heights.
• Land is the secure ground of home, the sea is like life, the outside, the unknown.
• It was only from an inner calm that man was able to discover and shape calm surroundings.
• It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process.
• It is hardly surprising that the Georgian domestic style emerges as the most remarkable in the 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.
• Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.
• The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.
• Houses mean a creation, something new, a shelter freed from the idea of a cave.