Welcome listeners to the editor's desk, our regular podcast here at First Things magazine.

And I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things, and I'm Rusty Reno.

I'm the editor of First Things, and I'm at the editor's desk.

And joining me is Michael Lewis, a professor of art history at Williams College,

and a regular writer for First Things.

And he recently, in the June-July issue contributed a

reflection on the work of Christopher Alexander, an article titled Architecture of Repair.

Welcome to the podcast, Michael. Thank you. So, Christopher Alexander, who was this guy?

He was an architect who didn't think architects were necessary.

He was a cult figure, and in some circles, he still is a cult figure, who is a cult figure, and in some circles he still is a cult figure, who is a fascination to two entirely different groups of people, to young would-be architects who offers an alternative vision of what architecture could be, but also he's known in the world of computer programmers.

He was in on the development of computer language from a very, very early date.

And he's an enigmatic figure, and you can't summarize him in a few sentences.

I think we're going to need our full 20 or 30 minutes to unravel him. Like so many important intellectual figures in

the second half of the 20th century, a refugee from Nazism, Jewish heritage, at least in part,

and went, I think, as you say, was a child, small child when he went to England,

his parents fled to England and grew up and then did his undergraduate studies at Cambridge

University in mathematics and physics.

And as a reader of Alexander, I got to say the mathematical, there's a kind of, he wrote a piece

for us called Making the Garden and in it, he insists that the connection between God and architecture, this is the theme

of that essay, is empirically verifiable.

It's a very strange, kind of runs like a light motif in his work, this weird sort of

toggling back and forth between sort of almost a spiritual sense of

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