xi
You are about to read a radical and visionary work of immanent practicality. The author gets straight
to the point: The critical issues we face as a global society require “a new manner of thinking if
humanity wants to survive.”
Sometimes it seems that when it comes to academic writing, the smaller the idea, the more one gets
support for publishing in ever narrower journals and conferences. The successful scholar becomes
adept at navigating the strict limitations of length, scope and methods insisted upon by peer reviewers
who have built their own careers on tweaking small increments of an idea inside an existing paradigm.
This is decidedly not that sort of book! It is, instead, a book of big ideas.
In a theoretical landscape of increasing fragmentation, a political and social realm of increasing
polarisation and an economic terrain of widening income disparity, Phillip Roös takes a reconstructive
integrating view. Nothing in academia or in professional practice rewards grand integrated thinking.
If we live in an era when many promote the end of truth and facts, the end result is a depressing nihilism where nothing means anything and the only truth allowed by a pathological postmodernism is that
there can be no metanarratives. Of course, that in itself is a metanarrative, as philosopher Ken Wilber
has pointed out. Wholeness does not exist to the postmodern deconstruction- obsessed consciousness.
Yet, wholeness is what is required, and Roös begins with the idea of wholeness, an unbroken vision
of the potential for a synthesis of nature and culture in which “humans and nature work together in a
developmental process that improves the value of the whole.” Wholeness is both a quality one can feel
and a structure of systems and relationships that can be mapped and ordered.
The problems Roös wants to address – ecological degradation and collapse, the threats to waterfronts, loss of indigenous knowledge, climate change, how design creates the feeling of life, the
regeneration of industrial wastelands, the nature deficiency of cities – are not solved by the elimination of big ideas, knowledge systems or overarching narratives. Instead they require new stories of the
Earth and better explanations for how individual design patterns fit together to build complex multiscalar settlements. To enter this realm takes a particular kind of courage combined with the humility of
an integral eye and mind.
Behind the deep solutions offered in this book is the author’s willingness to authentically see the
world, to trust his own experience and those of others as real in the face of so many apologists for the
failures of modern and postmodern architecture and urban design. Architects love to critique the work
of other architects but also to defend the value of their profession. As a discipline, we live in our heads
and tend to distance ourselves from the truths the whole human self, body included, has to teach us.
Few of us navigate a contemporary city in Australia or in America and exclaim about how lifeaffirming the experience is. Instead, as Roös puts it, the built environment is “almost un-imaginably
bad and unacceptable.” The ideals and principles taught in design schools simply don’t produce the
quality products as claimed. Even in terms of sustainable development, we are “still grasping at
straws, striving to achieve sustainable goals,” he says.
The theoretical part of this book defines a series of “fundamental” patterns for a “regenerativeadaptive pattern language.” These fundamental patterns are not spatial solutions but “idea patterns”
The Made Order and the Given Order, Unfolding
You are about to read a radical and visionary work of immanent practicality. The author gets straight
to the point: The critical issues we face as a global society require “a new manner of thinking if
humanity wants to survive.”
Sometimes it seems that when it comes to academic writing, the smaller the idea, the more one gets
support for publishing in ever narrower journals and conferences. The successful scholar becomes
adept at navigating the strict limitations of length, scope and methods insisted upon by peer reviewers
who have built their own careers on tweaking small increments of an idea inside an existing paradigm.
This is decidedly not that sort of book! It is, instead, a book of big ideas.
In a theoretical landscape of increasing fragmentation, a political and social realm of increasing
polarisation and an economic terrain of widening income disparity, Phillip Roös takes a reconstructive
integrating view. Nothing in academia or in professional practice rewards grand integrated thinking.
If we live in an era when many promote the end of truth and facts, the end result is a depressing nihilism where nothing means anything and the only truth allowed by a pathological postmodernism is that
there can be no metanarratives. Of course, that in itself is a metanarrative, as philosopher Ken Wilber
has pointed out. Wholeness does not exist to the postmodern deconstruction- obsessed consciousness.
Yet, wholeness is what is required, and Roös begins with the idea of wholeness, an unbroken vision
of the potential for a synthesis of nature and culture in which “humans and nature work together in a
developmental process that improves the value of the whole.” Wholeness is both a quality one can feel
and a structure of systems and relationships that can be mapped and ordered.
The problems Roös wants to address – ecological degradation and collapse, the threats to waterfronts, loss of indigenous knowledge, climate change, how design creates the feeling of life, the
regeneration of industrial wastelands, the nature deficiency of cities – are not solved by the elimination of big ideas, knowledge systems or overarching narratives. Instead they require new stories of the
Earth and better explanations for how individual design patterns fit together to build complex multiscalar settlements. To enter this realm takes a particular kind of courage combined with the humility of
an integral eye and mind.
Behind the deep solutions offered in this book is the author’s willingness to authentically see the
world, to trust his own experience and those of others as real in the face of so many apologists for the
failures of modern and postmodern architecture and urban design. Architects love to critique the work
of other architects but also to defend the value of their profession. As a discipline, we live in our heads
and tend to distance ourselves from the truths the whole human self, body included, has to teach us.
Few of us navigate a contemporary city in Australia or in America and exclaim about how lifeaffirming the experience is. Instead, as Roös puts it, the built environment is “almost un-imaginably
bad and unacceptable.” The ideals and principles taught in design schools simply don’t produce the
quality products as claimed. Even in terms of sustainable development, we are “still grasping at
straws, striving to achieve sustainable goals,” he says.
The theoretical part of this book defines a series of “fundamental” patterns for a “regenerativeadaptive pattern language.” These fundamental patterns are not spatial solutions but “idea patterns”
The Made Order and the Given Order, Unfolding