Giving Orders

 Giving Orders is a book about order, the way order invests in the natural world from the extents of the cosmos down to the smallest particles. The relevance of the orders to architecture has been lost at a time when the significance of physical laws to our lives could not be stronger. Our communication and control systems are derived from an understanding of the order underlying the behaviour of matter and energy.
 
Once poetry demanded form, meter and rhyme – now poetry is freed as word building. To the ancients, architecture was defined by the concept of the orders. Now, the distinction between building and architecture has become blurred. Rodney Black does not argue that the orders are essential for a building to be considered a work of architecture but he emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and referencing them in architectural design.
 
Giving Orders takes us on a journey from pre-history, exploring the orders through cross-cultural references and reveals connections between architecture, architects, human instincts, and the fundamental forces that govern the cosmos. The orders are therefore allegories.
 
Giving Orders is not a copy book, though there are plenty of drawn examples; it is an architectural tour from the awakening of awareness to the age of advanced Astro- and particle-physics.