Really one of the very largest problems that is facing the earth just now is rarely mentioned,

and that is the spread of ugliness.

Welcome to Current Affairs.

My name is Nathan Robinson.

I'm the editor in Chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

Today we're going to talk about one of my intellectual heroes, someone I've written about in current affairs a number of times, in articles on urban design and architecture,

someone who has gotten me in trouble, because when I write about this man's

ideas, I get a lot of people on the internet angry at me about my takes on architecture,

because the ideas of Christopher Alexander, who will be discussed in this program,

remain controversial in the field of architecture.

Christopher Alexander died this year at the age of 85, and with me to discuss Christopher

Alexander is Daniel Ornstein, the assistant city engineer for the city of Sarasota, Florida, a man I have known for a very long time since we were teenagers together in Sarasota, Florida at high school, and a man without whom I would never have discovered the works of Christopher Alexander. So Daniel Ornstein,

thank you so much for joining us on current affairs. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. We go back a long time. It's nice. We do indeed. I'll just start here because what I want

to do on this program is to lay out for people who Alexander

was, why he's interesting, why it's worth caring about his work and why his work is unique.

I will start just by reading a little bit of the New York Times obituary for him to give a sense,

which was actually quite good.

It says Christopher Alexander, architect who humanized urban design, dies at 85.

He was a fierce anti-modernist who championed vernacular structures, becoming a counterculture hero to many.

He was a theorist who believed that ordinary people, not just trained architects, should have a hand in designing their houses, neighborhoods, and cities, and proposed a method for doing so in writing that could be poetically erudite, frustratingly abstract, and breathtakingly simple.

He said he found traditional and indigenous structures, the beehive-shaped huts of North Africa, for example, or medieval

...