#23 – Yodan Rofe

#23 – Yodan Rofé

December 1st, 2025

Editor’s note: Additional reading for this episode = Yodan’s course overview and Beauty…

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This is Everything is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. Returning podcast guest, Yodan Rofé, is here today to speak with us about his friend and colleague, Christopher Alexander, the architect that I revere and that I’ve written about quite a few times in my column, Everything is Somewhere, and The American Surveyor magazine. Really looking forward to it. The books we’ll be talking about, Nature of Order, are very important to me and I think to the world.

Yodan? Welcome to Everything is Somewhere. As I started writing about it, I’m getting in touch with you and buildingbeauty.org and Maggie and the different guests that have come my way. It’s been a real pleasure and privilege and I appreciate it. Today, I’m hoping we’ll do a deep dive into Christopher Alexander’s magnum opus, The Four Volume Nature of Order and how you’re teaching it at campus that you facilitate or the scholastic program, excuse me.

I guess to get started, where does, we always call it a magnum opus, which seems fitting, but what was the writing practice that kind of led to Christopher’s perceived need to write The Nature of Order, and what was he trying to accomplish, and what was the writing process like? And then maybe also, why is it important?

Yodan Rofe:
Okay. First of all, I want to make a small correction. Chris Alexander was my teacher, my master, so to speak. I I assisted him for a while also in writing part of The Nature of Order, particularly Book Two, while I was also teaching assistant with him for teaching The Nature of Order. In a way, you know, he was one of maybe four great teachers that I had throughout my life. And I got to know his books quite early, even before starting my education as an architect. So I think the 1960s, I think from mid 1960s to mid 1970s were dedicated to developing pattern language and writing the timeless way of building as a kind of a theoretical basis, pattern language and doing a lot of work, professional work, supporting the developing of pattern language.

Always used professional work and teaching as a way of experimenting with things and trying to figure things out and whether his ideas were actually working in practice or not. So even though pattern language was published in 1977, as was the case with the nature of order. Also later, there were a lot of bootleg manuscripts running around all over the Bay area with former students and people who heard about it and, and, photo got its photocopied, et cetera. So, and people started building using, uh, pattern language and…

Yodan: (03:27.32)
…there were all kinds of, and then coming to Christian to show him what they’ve done. And he also had a rather large project of a mental health clinic in Modesto, California, where they did the work together with, with staff of the clinic to using the pattern language to lay out. And then once they had the layout, the plans were given to an architect to build and Chris was quite dismayed, I think, by the results. Both of the individual buildings that got built by architects and ordinary people and also by the Modesto Clinic, felt that something happened along the way in the transfer of the plans to a built project that it didn’t have the life that he expected pattern language to bring to architecture and to urban design.

Angus:
Was this his first large project?

No, I think they had a somewhat large project at the beginning of the process in Lima, Peru. But yeah, I think as a building project, I think that was the first large building project that he designed. He wasn’t involved in construction. That was one part of it. The second part of it was…

Yodan (05:01.74)
When they got in pattern language to write the construction patterns, there was a small revolt in the group at CES. And several of the architects felt that it was becoming too prescriptive and too limiting in terms of determining the construction system weren’t satisfied. And in fact, they left CES afterwards, opening their own office. So I think that was also another issue because really when you get down to the construction level, to the building practice, this is where you’re actually shaping the building. Because everything else before it is just ideas, basically, and things floating in the air.

But once you’re beginning to dig in the foundations and you’re beginning to the building, this is really where the character of the building begins to come to shine through. So, and he felt that pattern language was just didn’t give the enough instruction for people how to do it. That it was good as far as when he felt that the plan, it provided better plans, provided more functional plans, more humane buildings, but the buildings did not have the same force, same character, the same life that vernacular building and traditional buildings have throughout the history of the built environment.

So that started him thinking on what was missing. And what was missing really was a discussion of maybe the main task of an architect, which is to shape material, to create the geometry of the building. And his approach to begin tackling this problem was to start looking at objects and things and his own carpets. He became a collector of early, early Turkish carpets, Anatolian carpets…

Yodan (07:27.774)
…and began and try to figure out what was in the geometry of the buildings, geometry of art, art in the geometry of objects that are considered beautiful throughout many different human cultures in many centuries. And particularly looking at the geometry of these carpets, he began to notice that there was some similarity in the geometry of all these texts.

And just to break in briefly, he arrived at one of the great questions of philosophy. And it’s a huge topic, is how do we identify and maybe define beauty? It’s right up there. Is God real? How do we define beauty? Do we have free will? It’s such a core question. you were saying he got really serious about this. How do I do this? Yeah. Yeah. Lovely idea.

And, and well, as I said, Chris was a scientist and he was an incredibly pragmatic guy. He did not calculate from the point of view of philosophy. He tackled it from the point of view of observation, empirical observation of a lot of different things. He’s, and he’s based on two things. One is his own feeling of things that have life also corroborated by the fact that many of these objects had great value as art or crafts, historic art and crafts. they were all, most of them were things that could be founded in various museums of culture throughout the world. And then he used the same criteria that was used for…

Yodan (09:26.678)
…understanding good patterns, what are good patterns, and that is the feeling that is associated with it. The fact that we sense that they have more life than ordinary or other things. So these were basically the basis of his empirical observations. Once he had collected all these various things, and again, I think the carpets were very helpful because the carpets are really pure geometry. It’s pure geometry and color. It’s a little bit like, very much like a pixel picture because each knot is really a pixel and all these pixels create geometry with different colors. So it was kind of more easier to, it’s very, and it’s very abstract.

There aren’t really, I mean, there are things that seem to be like animals, but they’re very abstract abstracted. And so it’s really just geometry. so he began to try to figure out what was the basis of that geometry. And this is, the beginning of what we now call what he later called the 15 properties of, of living structure. And, and I think that’s, that’s among. And just to clue in listeners, these would be things like contrast, levels of scale, good shape, centers, boundaries.

Angus (11:07.598)
So apprehensible, measurable, observable qualities inherent in geometry that can be talked about and listed and discussed and what percentage is levels of scale or what does color play into this. It’s a theory of aesthetics, I guess we could say. And I think enormously useful. I first read them a good 15 years ago now and it became part of my mental shorthand for appraising a work of art or a building, you know, I like this, but why do I like that? And it was useful above all else. In just the world of art or rug judging, has there been any currency outside of architecture of the use of the 15-fund-a-month goal, properties for judging art.

I’m not a great expert in art criticism. And I find a lot of the writing about art. Actually, my brother-in-law is an art historian and curator. I find a lot of the reading, I find it difficult to read a lot of art history and art criticism. A lot of it is… Pretentious.

Yodan (12:38.734)
So I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m just not very knowledgeable about the literature about writing about art. So I have no idea whether there are… I know that in some of the conferences that I participated in, which were on pattern languages and the Nation of Order, there were some artists also showing their work.

I think I can see in the art that I do appreciate, I usually see the properties existing and in art that I appreciate less, usually, it’s very hard to find. But so much of art has become really conceptual and sort of symbolical and rhetorical in so many ways. And I find it very hard to get into.

My ex-wife is a quilter and teaches quilting. And when we came to the Bay Area, I think she started learning about quilting. And when we were there, there was an incredible show of Amish quilts at the de Young Museum in South. And they were just amazing in their quality.

And amazing examples of the 15 properties and they were made by ordinary women. They were not made by artists or people who aspire to be artists. So I think in, a lot of folk art or, or art that is considered amateur or not done by so-called artists, you can find 15 properties because people tend, tend to create them when they don’t have an agenda.

Angus (14:41.132)
I’ve noticed that myself. Thank you for entertaining that question. So where were we?

Yodan:
Yes. So I think that’s the origin. So throughout his, the 1980s, he was writing the manuscripts of the nature of order and, and it started as one book, I think it was called the one. And then it developed into a, into a couple of books and then into three books. And in the end, it became four books.

I first saw it in manuscript form in the office of Nelly Portugali, who studied for a year with Chris when she was there with her husband, Yuval Portugali, at a sabbatical. And she came back with these very three, very voluminous books in photocopies. And I remember reading it in her office. I was doing some work for her, stayed late reading those I described, being especially struck by the 15 properties, obviously, which seemed to explain so much for me.

And then the other thing which was immediately went to heart was the idea of the mirror of the self that in order to distinguish between more living structures or less living structures, good situations or bad situations, good buildings are less good or just even mostly between two options of doing the same thing. The best way to do it is to ask yourself which one of the configurations is a better mirror of my own self and my own self in the most deepest way that you can think of it. All of it, the good, the bad, the strong, the weak, et cetera. The friendly and the horrible, everything.

Yodan (16:42.41)
And each of us gradually we learned about ourselves. It’s not easy when you’re 20, you’re 20s, but I was, I think with time you learn about yourself. And so that was a very different way from pattern language because pattern language in a sense is still very much within the scientific functional, sociological, psychological paradigm and, and make sense to many people. mean, I think in that sense, that’s, think part of its success. And it’s, it’s other use is in, that it breaks down complex problems into more manageable problems. I think that’s another reason for its great success, particularly computer scientists.

But Nature of Order actually goes a lot more to the core of things. It goes to what is causing us to feel better in some places than in others. It helps us make even decisions about the course of our lives. So what we would like to do, what is better for us to do, to do one thing or another.

It basically becomes in the end, a different way of seeing the world and also a guide to carrying yourself in the world.

You put that very well and I’ve often kind of sought the words for the way that nature of order was affecting my life. And what I’ve said in the past is it’s, there’s an aspect of insisting on spirit in matter, which is, the great religious quest. How do we incorporate is spirit and matter a thing? And I think he clearly voted for…

Angus (18:53.56)
…bringing heaven and earth together and whatever terms you would say that and that great building accomplished that. At Shart, for example, anyway, I go on and on, I appreciate the way that you’re articulating how it affected you as you read it. And it’s one of the great fruits of the book. It’s as reading this you do think about how to live your life, which is pretty amazing for a book on architecture, ostensibly.

Yodan:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think I’m not sure that that I realized that when I was reading it for the first time, or even when I was teaching it at Berkeley, but with, with, you know, the more you read it, then the more you, you, you teach it to others, you begin to see that it’s, it’s a book about a lot more than just architecture. It’s about, who we are in the world and what is the world really? How can we make a more livable and inhabitable world.

Angus:
Yodan, I wonder if we could move into how your teaching that as a regular course at Building Beauty. Can you, how did that come about? What are you hoping to accomplish with Building Beauty and how have you set up coursework for Nature of Order and what kind of students are you reaching? Okay.

Yodan (20:24.014)
Okay. So when we started Building Beauty, you know, it’s always good when you’re starting something new, it’s always good to start from something. And that again, that’s another thing we learned from Chris. It’s much better to start with something existing and continue it rather than to try to invent X-Novel something. And so we started with the way Chris and organized, Chris and, and, and Hionice organized the building process area in Berkeley when we arrived there in the 1990s, it was actually the first time it was really set up. And it was set up with theoretical course, which was based on the nature of order, which was a lecture course, open also to undergrads, and then with a section for discussion for the graduate students.

Then the studio, obviously, which was in a sense, the practice of what you learn theoretically. And then there was a course in construction experience, which was basically working in projects by CES. And it was also a course that was open to undergraduates. And then there was various other courses, color, which were not given every year. And it also had the support of Gary Black, who was teaching structures at the same time, even though he was not formally within the area, but he was teaching structures and structure courses. So it was consonant with a lot of what Chris was teaching. So when we set up Building Beauty, we set up a similar set up where we had the nature of order as a theoretical seminar for the students, then the studio, which was actually doing the work.

And then we had a course in construction, which culminated in the students actually building something in the courtyard, the garden of the Santana Institute in Sorrento where we started the courses. And I took upon myself to teach the nature of order. But I didn’t feel comfortable to teach it the way Alexander and then later on.

Yodan (22:51.338)
I organized, took it as a series of lectures because I felt, I just didn’t feel that I knew enough to, and I didn’t want to. I wanted actually the students to encounter Alexander on their own terms, not to learn it from me like secondhand. And so I decided to teach it as a reading seminar and I actually started doing that in my own university for several years, but teaching only the first book, not going beyond that because it wasn’t in the context of an architecture program. And that seemed to work pretty well. The students read the book, particularly in those couple of years when they were a very, very small class, were about seven students only. it was, they had to read because it was quite obvious if they didn’t read.

And they spend a lot of time reading and the discussions were also very good. Then at some point, I think it was in the second year already, we said, well, it’s a bit of a pity that we were having all these discussions, but it’s only just very small group. Why don’t we open it up as a webinar? Partly because I couldn’t be there all the time. I had, I took, I did the class partly through Skype.

And we looked for a good platform to do that. And we recommended Zoom. And in fact, we started teaching it on Zoom before COVID kind of forced everyone to move online. And then when we moved online, it was just, we just took it off from there. So the first years were really very much a reading seminar where each student, students had to take turns in presenting the chapters and then we just would have a discussion. I would do some, sometimes I would do a little, a small lecture about something and, and really that’s, that was the way we taught the first and second books.

Yodan (25:01.078)
And then at some point, I don’t remember exactly when, when it came to discussing the third book, is mostly discussion of particular problems of architecture and urban planning and design using Alexander’s own work as examples. I felt that while the students could read the book for Alexander’s examples, we might as well bring other people that have tried doing similar stuff.

And have them talk about their projects. And in this way, the students would see two things. First of all, somewhat different approaches, different contexts to solving problems using Alexander’s knowledge base. And also that it’s possible to do these things in the world, even if you’re not Christopher Alexander. Because I think there’s so much of it has been only him or it’s so identified within that people kind of think that, you have to be Chris Alexander to this thing. It’s not something for ordinary human beings, which is totally not true. So that was with regard to the third book. And then with the fourth book.

I always felt uncomfortable with fourth book because I don’t believe in God and reference to the Luminous Ground and all that. It took me a long time to come to terms with it and I’m still not sure that I’ve come to terms with it. know, and so I’m very much in sympathy with you about that. Book four, The Luminous Ground asks a lot. And for me, it hit me, I think, differently than it hit you. Maybe because I was born religious and it’s always been part of my life. I’m wondering, can I read your closing paragraph from your paper on Nature of Order? Because I thought it was a…

Angus Stocking (27:07.608)
…profound and personal and useful. Let’s see. The paper’s name, and we’ll get a link to it in the show notes, is Teaching the Nature of Order. In the very last paragraph, you write, Personally, I am uneasy about a transcendent reality underlying our world, as was Alexander himself about this notion, although I must say that I haven’t found any good alternative explanation to what ultimately are centers.

Not being a religious person, I find the reference to God more disturbing than illuminating. The grandness of the universe, our own fleeting moment within it, the intricacy of life and its fragility, the beauty of the world that humans can touch and emulate, if they just pay attention to it and to the way it resonates with our own self. These are enough for me as an ideal to strive toward in my own teaching of the nature of order. I think that’s beautiful. Captures a very authentic feeling and actually not so different than Christopher himself. As he was writing in Luminous Ground, he more or less said that he kind of wished that he wasn’t being led to these inevitable conclusions of a transcendent reality, but he was honest enough to admit that they were.

Thank you.

Angus (28:37.056)
and was trying to deal with it. Is that the way you see it?

Yeah, absolutely. think, you know, Chris was incredibly rigorous as a person and I think he had a difficult, difficult time living with unanswered questions. He was driven to answer the questions that came up before him. And in fact, I think because he was of this nature, that was his nature, he created these

this wonderful body of work that is so magnificent. For me, I can stay at the not understanding, at the level of, okay, I know there is something there. I don’t have a good explanation for it. I can live with lack of explanation and with everything else that comes on the way.

That’s one of the beauties of the Nature of Order. You don’t have to even believe in centers to be able to create. It’s, it’s a little bit, if you just pay attention and even say, okay, I don’t know what these centers are, but let’s say there are centers and this is how they behave and this is what they create. And this is the way you can put them together. And it still works. So for me, the philosophical debate or.

Whether there is a God, there isn’t a God, there isn’t luminous ground, there isn’t luminous ground. Maybe, you know, maybe physicists in the end will find the theory that explains it all. I can live without it. And I said, Chris had to go all the way. I don’t have to go all the way.

Angus (30:21.518)
What does this go over with your students in the course as you teach book four? Are they kind of led to this point of having to decide on transcendence?

Yodan:
Yeah, but let me first describe how we’re teaching book four, which is again, something that we came gradually to. First of all, for, for several years, I was teaching it with two great architects from India. Munchwar Ashish Ganju, who sadly had died during COVID and Narendra Dengle. And they, you know, they, they come from culture in which transcendent stuff is there. For them, it was completely natural. So they didn’t have any problem with it. And so they took on some of the chapters and presented them, also putting in this land of their own worldview, which obviously resonates with Chris’s words.

In the last few years, what I’ve been doing with the fourth book is I invite people to talk either about parallel conceptions in other fields, not in architecture, which are similar or consonant with Alexander’s thinking. And I think when you talk with Orr, you’ll probably talk about Ian Gilchrist, one of those people. Criticisms.

Of book four and alternative explanations. had Jenny Quillian present the. Psychological. Explanation, which Chris debunks at the beginning of the book. I have to say, I was quite mean to her when she described it because I really debunked the psychological explanation because I really don’t think it really works very well.

Yodan (32:36.15)
We had Nikos describe relationship to physics, quantum physics. so, so this, these are the kind of, so we were kind of looking at it in a more critical way, not just reading it for its own words, but you get more critically, at least in the webinar. In the seminar, we still discuss the chapters and try to understand the chapters. But again, I tend to concentrate.

On the way that the chapter, the book helps us students and me do the work, do the C centers for what they are, understand how they work together, understand what is reaching into our own self, understanding what deep feeling is learning to feel, which I don’t think comes naturally to a lot of us, especially after we’ve been through an ordinary education. all these things are, again, as I said, you don’t have to go all the way to get what you need to get from people. And so this is the way I teach it.

I think if you read, if you go through the whole process of reading the Nature of Order or, or learning it sometimes, I don’t, I don’t know whether everybody reads everything. think it’s pretty hard to read the whole four books in a short time. It changes the way you see the world. And so when we finished the course, I, that’s actually one of the things that I, tried to find out from students whether, whether it has changed the way they, they, they saw, they see the world.

And I think if, if I, I feel that it has, then I think I’ve succeeded. If it’s not, then I probably didn’t succeed in transforming. It’s not their view. It’s, it’s really, you see a different world. It’s like, like as if some, took off some screen from in front of your eyes and you actually see things in a completely different way.

Angus (34:59.352)
kind of like with the 15 properties, if you’re given language to describe and talk about what you’re seeing, that helps quite a bit and changes what you see. You alluded to senators and you could make them without knowing what they are.

Throughout Nature of Order, there’s the idea of life, living structure, life inherent in geometry. What have you done with that idea, the concept of life and infrastructure, I guess we could say, or how do you, what are your feelings about that? How do you convey that? What do you think Nature of Order says about that? And how important a concept is that? To me, it bedrock, but…

But I noticed that Christopher’s most ardent student and fans don’t talk about it that much. What are your feelings? Yeah, about life and structure, about life.

Yodan:
Well, I recently, I’ve been trying to give some introductory lectures where I kind of tell people what the whole, what nature order is all about. uh, and so usually when I, when I try to do that, I don’t even talk about centers because if you talk about centers…

Yodan (36:30.712)
…people’s understanding of what a center is, is very, very different from what Alexander means when he says center. People understand center as the center of something. Alexander uses the word center as center of attention, focus of attention. It’s interesting that in Hebrew, you can translate center into two different words. One is a center of something.

Merkaz is the Hebrew word. And the other one is center of attention, moquete, which is something that you focus. So I don’t really talk about that. I just talk about life because I think life, when Chris talks about life, it’s a very intuitive understanding and everybody understands these. You give a few examples, you say the life of a party or life of streets, or, you know, you can, you can see that.

At least metaphorically, people understand life. So I think that’s usually would be my approach. And that’s usually what I, what we start with also. then really gradually as it does in the book, it gradually moves from life to our notion of order. And then begins with the notion of centers and the 15 property. The, know, the first book is really neatly divided into really two parts.

The first part is all about structure, almost in a scientific manner. Alexander calls living structure. again, living structure, the life goes into it as a distinguishing mark. And then the second part is all about feeling the personal nature of order. The fact that if something is alive, has life, then we have more life. So we have in a sense, direct connection to that something.

And then we can set this through our own sense of life. And then obviously near of the self comes in as a kind of the. Yeah. So that’s, that’s really the first book. Again, the book that I think is really the center of the nature of order is, not the first book. The second book, the process for creating life. again, here we’re going to, we, life is again, the central, central concept.

Yodan (38:56.724)
And because what the nature of order is such that you cannot create the 15 properties in a mechanical way. They have to be created in a particular kind of process, which Alexander understands to be very, very similar to the process that creates the world inorganic and an organic world. so in a sense, he tries to emulate the living process of the natural world within the built environment. If we go back to the fact that pattern language was supposed to tell us how to create human environments, then the second book, the process of creating life is supposed to tell us how to build those human environments.

And in fact, there’s also a place for patterns in it as a sub topic. One of the chapters talk about pattern. So you set yourself a big task to convey the profanities of nature of order in a way that increases the appreciation for Christopher’s way of seeing the world. in a way, it’s an initiation. You’re hoping to inculcate a way of seeing the world that perhaps students didn’t have before. How do you think you’re doing? A successful venture or graduates, are they disciples at bear fruit in the world of building things?

Yodan (40:34.71)
Yeah. You can’t succeed with everyone. I think we have a pretty good batting average, I think most of our students, and I’m not talking just about the Nature of Order. I’m talking about the whole program. Most of our students, I think they come out feeling that learn something positive. Not all of them remain in contact. So it’s hard to know how and in what way they make use of it.

Some of them do. Some of them have become part of the program already teaching in the program. We are not going to be there forever. And hopefully there will be other people continuing what we’re But we still have a way to go. I think in terms of institutionalization of the program and ensuring that it will continue beyond us. We’re only there eight years, started in 2017. So I’m hoping that in the next five to 10 years, which is probably the time that I will be able to devote this program.

Still that we will, we will have, have, created that we have different ideas of where, where to go and how, how to go. We want to create other possible programs in other continents. We started on it, COVID kind of stole us, but hopefully we can be back on that track. And we want to actually have some cooperation. We have a cooperation with one university in the US, Hartford University. In the US, hopefully this year we will finally sign an agreement with them for Sorrento to become a study abroad place for the students in the Department of Architecture there. And that will enable us to go back…

Yodan (42:40.704)
…at least half a year to, for three months to, so to continue building in Sorrento. But I’m also hoping create some cooperation with none, not necessarily with architectural programs, with programs that are related to other aspects that can profit the nature of order. And then students can do our program and then continue for in another program with whatever they learn from us. So that’s another line of, anyway, I’m retiring from my own university at end of this year, this academic year, and I will be able to devote more time to building beauty and I hope we can do more and better.

Angus:
Well, it’s important work. It seems to be in good hands and you’re seeing success. And dare I say it, I think that you’re doing God’s work. And I hope it prospers. My feelings is that my big concentration professionally is writing about infrastructure, pretty nitty-gritty stuff. And there’s nothing I come across in my writing practice, whether it’s GIS or sewers or dams or buildings or highways, that the work couldn’t be done better without more appreciation for life and geometry and centers and patterns.

Yodan:
No, absolutely. think, I think, know, infrastructure, has a huge impact on the world. Usually you, yeah, it’s usually huge investments also. mean, there’s a lot of money involved and, I think if you, if you look at the infrastructure built in the 19th century, which was also already a modern time and it’s beauty, the beauty of, of… It is that…

Yodan Rofe (44:49.432)
…infrastructure relative to what we built today, you can see that something was lost in the way that engineers are taught and in understanding that, you know, I always think of, you know, city walls, medieval city walls, or even Baroque time city walls, which were huge investments by that, for that time.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ferrara where they have still have intact most of the walls built in the 16th century or Bergamo that the walls of the Venetian walls of Bergamo, which are actually UNESCO, they’re a UNESCO heritage site together with other Venetian type Venetian walls that were built in other places like in Rhodes. And you say, well, this is a utilitarian thing that they built, right? It was military.

And yet they spent time and effort making it beautiful as well. And if we designed and built ditches, culverts, roads, windmills, for the Voltaic, not electric, windmills to create wind power, electricity in a way that is beautiful and helpful to the landscape rather than damaging to the landscape. And consider these things also as then I think a lot of the ugliness of our world would have disappeared.

There is a place like in Sweden, there is the area of South Sweden. It’s kind of a sloping hills, which in summer are planted with grain, very, very beautiful countryside. And one of the things that they have done is they don’t allow electrical lines, perhaps in the air. All electrical lines have to be buried. And the result of that, there are two results. One is that the electrical lines are not damaged in storms, which they have there. And two, that the countryside has remained and you don’t…

Yodan (47:19.63)
First of all, you perceive the beauty and you don’t understand, there’s always, you feel as if there’s something missing here. I don’t, I’m not seeing something here because we’re so used to seeing electrical, electrical lines and these ugly towers. And then you, you realize that it’s just not there because obviously because they have decided that it’s more important to maintain the beauty of the countryside. You know, we did some work together with my professor, my other professor, Alan Jacobs.

We did work on boulevards as again, this is streets. are the types of streets that kind of were born sometimes in the 18th century, but became really useful in the expansion of cities in the 19th century. And they created these streets to be functional, to create movement space, to connect growing cities in a way that people could transfer them more quickly. These streets also allowed later for sewers to go under and for subways to go on. But they made them mostly to be beautiful. then, and they’re still loved and cherished more than 150 years after they were built. They were considered often to be the most beautiful streets in the city where they are.

Frederick Law Olmsted designed Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway before the urbanization of Brooklyn as a kind of a sign that this is going to be a beautiful city in order to promote the place as a place for people to move into. We have totally forgotten that kind of point of view with our very functionalistic view of the world.

Angus (49:22.85)
You longtime readers of my column in The American Surveyor Magazine know that I have made myself something of an evangelist for the ideas of Christopher Alexander, especially the teachings found in his four-volume magnum opus, Nature of Order. And so I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope that listeners found it interesting. And thanks to Yodan for making it happen. A transcript of this episode and show notes can be found at amerisurv.com slash podcast. That’s A-M-E-R-I-S-U-R-V dot com slash podcast.

I received some nice feedback from a listener named Renana this week who emailed, Hi Angus, just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your interview with Anna Rios. I may have met her at the Surveyor’s Historical Society rendezvous in Ohio a few months ago, but did not catch the name of the person there telling me about the Women Surveyor’s Summit. Renana goes on to say that she lives in Indiana, has been licensed since 1999 and has been at the same company for 20 years. Good on her. Love to hear from licensed surveyors and congratulations on a great career. She’s referring to episode 18 with Anna Rios.

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Angus Stocking: Thanks for listening to this 23rd episode of Everything is Somewhere, and thanks to Yodan for being such an interesting guest. As always, I welcome feedback. You can send me feedback directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or anonymously at amerisurv.com slash podcast. You can follow me on X or Twitter at twitter.com/Surveying

Last but not least, if you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or rate the podcast or the episode. Finally, if LinkedIn is your thing, I hope that you will reach out and connect with me. I’m easy to find. There is only one Angus Stocking.