STEPHEN GARDINER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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