Top 40 Stephen Gardiner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Industrial Revolution was another one of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

9. “Human requirements are the inspiration for art.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

16. “The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

19. “In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

21. “Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

31. “What people want, above all, is order.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

33. “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.”

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner

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

— Stephen Gardiner