Quotes from Stephen Gardiner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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