#17 – Maggie Moore Alexander & Yodan Rofe

July 31st, 2025

#17 – Maggie Moore Alexander and Yodan Rofe

Angus Stocking (Host):
This is Everything is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. Today’s special guests are Maggie Moore Alexander and Yodan Rofe. I say special because both are colleagues and friends of the late Christopher Alexander—an architect, philosopher of the built world, and spiritual figure whom I revere.

Maggie is the president of the Center for Environmental Structure. She served as Alexander’s editor and worked with him to produce his four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order, as well as the influential The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World Systems, among other projects. She has a master’s degree in organizational change and development, and Maggie is also Christopher’s widow.

Yodan, a former student and colleague of Alexander, is an architect and urban planner with more than 30 years of teaching and research experience. He’s a faculty member at the Department of Environmental, Geoinformatic, and Urban Planning Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Both are founders of Building Beauty, a multidisciplinary educational program and community of explorers founded in 2017 to extend Christopher Alexander’s legacy and provide an alternative path for students and practitioners in the building professions, by providing academic and experiential knowledge of Alexandrian building principles. To learn more, please visit buildingbeauty.org.

Maggie, Yodan, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Maggie Moore Alexander:
Thank you.

Yodan Rofe:
Thank you.

Angus Stocking (Host):
To both of you, I should say right off: I had a stroke back in May, and to listeners—you may hear a bit of a stammer in my voice. I was not speaking at all for a while, so I’m happy to have anything at all. Just so you know, I may stumble a bit and I’m going to lean on you two to do most of the eloquent speaking, because that’s been removed from me to an extent.

Anyway, we were talking earlier, and you both are aware from previous conversations that I deeply admire Christopher Alexander. I also regret that he’s not better known among the people who are making buildings and other infrastructure—infrastructure including sewers and dams and so forth—because I believe that if his principles of building were better known and more widely applied, it would be not only a more beautiful world, but a more functional world in which humans could lead better lives. Is that fair to say? What are your thoughts on Christopher Alexander in today’s world?

Maggie Moore Alexander:
I think that’s fair. I think that many of our endeavors from day to day could be supported if people better understood what Chris’s work was about—what he intended to provide us with and support us with. So yes, I agree.

Yodan Rofe:
I agree too. I think one of the interesting things is when you look at things built in the 19th century—even though it was a century of enormous growth and new engineering works—beauty was always a criterion. When they built train stations or dams or large buildings, beauty mattered. That was something totally forgotten in the 20th century.

I think one of Alexander’s great contributions is that he brings back the importance and unifies function and beauty as one thing. They’re not two separate things, but one.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Exactly. Yodan, one of the most provocative and fundamental aspects of Christopher’s work from the beginning was his insistence on the idea of “life” and “living structure.” For listeners who may not be familiar, could you give us a brief—but precise—overview of what “life” meant to Christopher Alexander, as it pertains to architecture?

Yodan Rofe:
In Alexander’s work, it starts very early as an intuition. Even in his first work, he was trying to understand what it was that made built places truly have life. He eventually realized it was a very complex issue.

In his famous paper, “A City Is Not a Tree,” he explored this. Then, when trying to understand how to create life—because that was the basis of all his intellectual work—he developed the theory of pattern language. This was a way of trying to handle complexity, and yet bring it to a level where you could simplify actions by following particular patterns in a particular structural way.

Later on, he found that this was not sufficient to create places and buildings with life, and so he developed the theory of centers, which is more about form and process—about how to actually build life into structures.

In a sense, the whole journey for him was a journey of discovery that went beyond just design, going into a basic worldview—questioning whether we see the world as a living thing, or as a machine. Once you understand the world as living, you realize you cannot simply design it mechanically; you have to cultivate it, just as you cultivate anything living.

Angus Stocking (Host):
That’s beautifully put, thank you.

Maggie, you were married to Christopher and lived with him. What’s your sense of the concept of life in structure?

Maggie Moore Alexander:
Well, I’ll have to say I began with very little understanding. I’m not an architect. I’d read some of Chris’s work, but not a lot. The Nature of Order had just been published—book one was out. I had to read, not only from an intellectual level, but also process it in my own way, which is more practical. And I had him as a coach, which was indeed fortunate.

As I read, I looked around and discovered what he was talking about that I had never noticed before—particularly with book one of The Nature of Order. It was surprising and challenging; I had to change a lot of my orientation to the world, as Yodan described, but I found it enriching. Gradually, I became his editor, and we would get into deep conversations about how he wanted to express these ideas. He was always challenged by that too—how to say it well enough so that we could understand and begin exploring on our own.

I have a very personal orientation. What truly changes the world is what it means to each of us. It’s not enough just to read it—we have to find it within ourselves.

Angus Stocking (Host):
That’s beautiful, thank you.

Yodan, you mentioned that most people know Christopher Alexander’s name—if they know it at all—from A Pattern Language, believed to be the world’s bestselling book of architecture, and which has been influential among the counterculture, writers like Stewart Brand, and more. Thousands of people have surely built homes and other structures according to its principles, and that’s where I learned about Christopher Alexander.

But as I recall from my own interviews and correspondence with Christopher Alexander, he had a complicated relationship with A Pattern Language. He didn’t disavow it, but felt that in his four-volume magnum opus The Nature of Order, he had gone well beyond it. He was attempting to establish a theoretical—and even spiritual—foundation for ideas that originated in A Pattern Language but were further defined in The Nature of Order. Am I getting that transition right? Was there significant growth in his ideas with The Nature of Order?

Yodan Rofe:
Yes, definitely. He had a strong scientific orientation—he studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge, and his PhD at Harvard (even though it was in architecture) involved cognitive science.

His struggle was always about making sense of what we do in design and building—what is the thought process we use? And, in the end, as he used to say, the proof was in the pudding: the building had to be equivalent to the great works of art built by past human cultures. As long as he felt that the work—even his own work and the work of those using A Pattern Language—was not reaching that standard, he felt something was missing. He wanted to reach the same level of quality in our own time, using our own means and within our own limits—economic, political, technological.

So, in the 1970s, as A Pattern Language was being bootlegged around Northern California and people were building with patterns, he saw the results and wasn’t satisfied—they didn’t reach the level he aspired to. That set him on a 30-year path leading to The Nature of Order. I was lucky enough to study at Berkeley in the early 1990s, as this work was taking shape and even participate in the first public courses on The Nature of Order. It was mind-blowing.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Did you work on any particular structures with Christopher?

Yodan Rofe:
I took a construction course—part of the building process area of emphasis, set up at Berkeley at the time. One of the courses was a construction course in which we participated in the building of a residential home in Palo Alto, California. That was the only building I worked on directly with Chris. Most of my work with him was as a teaching assistant for The Nature of Order and as a research assistant while he worked mostly on Book 2.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Maybe we can switch topics for a bit. Maggie, can you tell us about buildingbeauty.org? How did it get started? What exactly is it? What do you hope to accomplish, and what kind of activity is happening at Building Beauty now?

Maggie Moore Alexander:
Okay, that’s a lot! It started in 2017, when our colleague Sergio Porta—who teaches architecture at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland—visited us and said there was an opportunity to start a new, post-graduate architecture program. Chris was ill by then, so it was up to a group of us to gather people and try to bring something to fruition by that fall.

We gathered people who had worked with Chris at Berkeley in the 1990s, and used his model of teaching to put together a course for people of all backgrounds: architects, laypeople, professionals like engineers, community builders. Our goal was always to spread our reach into different communities and help them grow, as Yodan described, bringing life and beauty wherever we could.

Now, we are about to begin our ninth year. We’ve grown a lot; we’ve added more courses. We concentrate on each student’s goals—how to prepare them to provide leadership wherever they live or work. Our program, in terms of setting people up for how they want to contribute for the rest of their lives, is getting stronger each year, which I’m very pleased about.

For me, it was important that Chris understood his legacy would continue. It was a joy to watch him excited by what we were doing and accomplishing, even before he passed away.

Yodan Rofe:
We started out physically at the Santa Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy, where the course was given the first couple of years. The course was structured much like Chris’s graduate building process courses at UC Berkeley: a theoretical course (The Nature of Order), a studio for hands-on learning, and a construction course where the students actually built elements in the Institute’s garden, like a bench and a pergola.

The pandemic forced us to move online, which was challenging but unexpectedly beneficial. It made participation accessible worldwide. Now, first semester courses are all online, and in the second semester, students do a project in their own community. They have to take responsibility for everything from planning to execution, learning firsthand what it means to make something alive and how much effort, involvement, and hard work it really takes.

Over the years, we’ve adapted the course to accommodate the variety in our student body—many from fields outside architecture, including computer science, design, building trades, or even aspiring developers. So we often have to teach some basic architectural skills alongside Alexander’s theories.

Another addition to the curriculum is a course called “Self and Wholeness,” which explores the connection between the health and beauty of the world and our own self—our well-being. This isn’t something Chris taught directly, but his work deeply hinted at it. The studio uses the idea of the mirror of the self, and the course teaches students to connect more deeply with themselves—a challenge in today’s culture, which can distance people from their sense of self.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Wonderful, and perhaps it’s a little pompous of me, but I want to thank you personally. I’m glad there are people doing this work. Kudos for doing a very important thing.

Maggie Moore Alexander:
Angus, it’s very important for you to pay attention, and we’re happy it makes you happy. We hope this is true for people all over. The joy of the community keeps us going.

Angus Stocking (Host):
I’ve tried to get land surveyors interested in Alexander’s ideas, as well as urban planners and geospatial professionals. I think it’s having some effect, and I hope this podcast spreads the word further. For listeners—this is the first of several monthly episodes we’ll devote to Christopher Alexander’s ideas and his importance to the built world.

Yodan, could you talk about the coursework at Building Beauty? What courses have you offered, and do students come together and make things? Publications? What’s the academic component?

Yodan Rofe:
Recently, we added a construction experience course—something like the construction course Alexander had. Some people learn by understanding first, then doing; others understand through doing. In this course, students choose a hands-on project to carry out with our guidance. You don’t even have to know about Alexander before starting—through the course, you learn the basic concepts, and if you’re curious you can go deeper with other courses. I’ve become less orthodox about insisting people learn everything rigorously from the start.

This draws from Alexander’s idea that we won’t reach a better world through big, grand narratives, but through many, many small interventions—a lot of little seeds. I see our students as those seeds, taking what they’ve learned with them for life.

Angus Stocking (Host):
I’ll echo that there’s almost a culture war happening, maybe always has been, separating people from their own, often-correct, inclinations about beauty. Our systems can distract us from engaging at a human level and tell us our personal experience isn’t important. Self and Wholeness helps students connect with their inner voice, figure out what it means, take it seriously, and understand how it can contribute to community.

Christopher’s ideas about the built world are very common in computer programming now. I interviewed Ryan Singer on this podcast, who has applied pattern language and The Nature of Order to programming. Why do you think Alexandrian ideas are so robust outside architecture?

Yodan Rofe:
I think programmers were initially attracted like many architects. Some colleagues stayed fixated on pattern language and did meaningful work within that. Patterns were immediately appealing for programmers: discrete elements combining in many ways, creating new programs, which is very much how they work.

But more deeply, Alexander’s theories acknowledge the world’s complexity while giving you simple ways to handle it. Our minds can only deal with so much at once—we’re almost happiest when solving manageable problems. Alexander always said: do one thing at a time. His approach gives a path for structuring creative processes in manageable stages.

I think that’s why programmers gravitated to the work—it’s about structuring complexity so humans can meaningfully engage with it.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Can I ask you a question?

Yodan Rofe:
Yes, but let me just say: you said, “We feel best when we solve problems.” That’s not my idea, but it’s a wonderful idea to guide much of life. I’ll be quoting you on that!

What’s your question for me?

Angus Stocking (Host):
As a surveyor, what made Alexander relevant for your work?

The first thing I’d say: Surveyors are involved in subdividing land into reasonable shapes and lots. Usually, this is done for practical reasons—profit or organization—so you get square parcels, straight lines, and equal areas.

Even before I’d heard of the nature of order, I did some subdivision planning and found it easy to go a little way toward “life” just by doing topographic surveys first, identifying beautiful areas, respecting lines in the landscape—swales, rivers, tree edges, centers. I didn’t know the word “centers,” but recognized the idea.

A bit of knowledge about Alexander’s way of organizing space, not strictly according to math or profit, enabled me to make better subdivisions—more beautiful and livable. And most people in the process want to do that. Even planning committees often want beauty, and it’s easier to sell those ideas with some Alexandrian perspective.

Surveyors also make maps—records expected to be visual references for decades or centuries. There’s a way to make those maps more living objects that are pleasurable to look at—thanks to Christopher Alexander, and writers like Edward Tufte (on visual display of quantitative information). With that knowledge, I made better, more appealing and useful maps—some still in use in Dodge and Washington County, Wisconsin. My own garage is a nicer place because I know what space can be.

Yodan Rofe:
When I first came across your writing, I wondered why a land surveyor would be so interested in Alexander. One of the major problems in understanding centers is they aren’t easy to represent in maps, which are the way most of us “see” the world.

If we could create a way to survey that recognizes centers and gives them form in maps, that would significantly change how we see things. With our Building Beauty students, we ask them to create two maps at the beginning of each project—a “center map” that diagrams the major centers in a place and gives them names, and a “feeling map,” where they rate their feelings at various locations.

The “base map” is of incredible importance; it’s what surveyors do. If the base map is good, everything else is better. If it misses key things, the process goes awry. With GIS, so many modern maps are horrible—they do not convey a sense of place. That’s a big remaining problem.

Angus Stocking (Host):
I write about GIS too—one of my clients is Esri—and they might not want to hear this, but those maps are often ugly! They produce information rapidly, but the information is not always presented as something pleasant to look at. That may improve in the future.

Yodan Rofe:
To make maps better, you need a lot of work. Usually, GIS professionals aren’t trained in visual design. Graphic artists learn it, but not GIS personnel. Sorry, I took us off on a tangent.

Angus Stocking (Host):
That’s why you’re here, Yodan! As we draw to a close, could we talk a bit about what effects nine years of Building Beauty courses have had? Are there buildings, projects, or urban planning examples that are better because a student has extended these ideas into the world?

Maggie Moore Alexander:
All our students take on independent projects in their second term. They spend the first term learning skills, then involve their communities to get others engaged in their independent projects.

Pretty much everywhere, students have made changes. Most projects in the context of The Nature of Order are ongoing—you may not finish, because a living system goes on, if you’re lucky and paying attention.

We’ve had projects in Detroit, in Nigeria (a student starting work in his small city), and landowners working on their properties. Even where I live in southern England, Chris bought the property in 1995, and 23 years later, it still evolves.

Most of our students finish with a set of skills they’ll carry forward wherever they go. Chris approached everything as an experiment—a learning opportunity. That’s the ethic and practice we hope to instill.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Incidentally, Maggie, Christopher wrote so lyrically about southern England—a special place he was proud to be part of. I’m glad your corner of southern England is continuing to adapt.

Yodan Rofe:
If I can add: at the Santa Anna Institute itself, where we started, we definitely made a difference. It’s a former monastery, now mainly for foreign students. The garden was nice, but not much used. After our first-year students presented a pattern language for improving the garden, the staff implemented real changes—they made the garden more accessible and more lived-in.

There’s also a project in Malmö, where a student started a community garden on top of a modernist community center. Others have transformed private spaces, like a bathroom, making these everyday spaces full of life.

Research shows our quality of life depends more on daily regularities than big events. Something as small as a beautiful bathroom can have a big impact.

Angus Stocking (Host):
Yodan, I feel like you often sneak up on spiritual truths beautifully expressed in a dry scientific way, and I appreciate it.

Maggie Moore Alexander:
Hear, hear!

Yodan Rofe:
We’ll have more time to talk when we discuss teaching The Nature of Order.

Angus Stocking (Host):
I’m looking forward to that. But for now—Maggie, Yodan—thank you so much for this conversation.

(Outro: Angus Stocking [Host])

Thanks for listening to this episode of Everything is Somewhere. I want to thank listeners for their patience. You may notice it’s been a couple of months since my last episode—due to a fairly serious stroke at the end of May. This is my first episode as I recover; you may also notice a bit of a stammer or slur in my speech. I am working on that.

I’ve received some feedback in the last couple of months. Andy Lowings, a land surveyor in Cambridgeshire, England, wrote, “I just read your article on setting out crop circles. As a surveyor myself, I found it well written and understandable.” That’s the best feedback a writer can get—thank you, Andy.

Joey Waltz wrote on LinkedIn: “Enjoyed your Wendy Lathrop interview. Thanks for a great show for American Surveyor.” Thank you, Joey, and thanks also to Wendy.

I love hearing from listeners! You can subscribe to the show and rate or review episodes on Spotify or iTunes. You can email me directly or provide feedback anonymously at amerisurv.com/podcast-feedback/. And you can always find me on LinkedIn; there’s only one Angus Stocking.

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