Maggie Moore Alexander
President and Co-founder
Maggie Moore Alexander is the President of The Center for Environmental Structure (CES), which was established by Christopher Alexander in 1967 as a non-profit educational institution in California, USA. It has offered architects and engineers the opportunity to delve into profound research in the nature and qualities of Architecture and concurrently see the results manifested in actual buildings and projects designed and built worldwide. The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive provides access to this body of work.
Over the years, the educational and research character was expanded to include professional design and construction of towns and neighborhoods, buildings and interior spaces, public spaces and gardens, office furniture, hand-made tiles and other artifacts. Experimentation and research has been the main ingredient that attributes a particular quality to CES’s architectural work, distinguishing it from other contemporary architecture.
In many parts of the world, Professor Alexander and colleagues, including architects, engineers, city planners, students, and lay people who would occupy the built structures produced, worked together to design and build environments with life and beauty. Each project involved new design and construction methods and/or materials. Altogether these projects represent a coherent body of work that continues to grow as people in neighborhoods, communities and cities get more involved in shaping or renewing their built environments, and search for tools to do this in a more human and effective way. Building Beauty continues to support these efforts with our students and supporters.
CES publishes Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order, a four-book series in which he explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order – and in all life – from micro-organisms and mountain ranges to good houses and vibrant communities.
Book 1 – The Phenomenon of Life
Book 2 – The Process of Creating Life
Book 3 – A Vision of A Living World
Book 4 – The Luminous Ground
These books provide the theoretical backbone of Building Beauty.
Maggie served as Alexander’s editor, and worked with him to produce The Nature of Order and The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems, as well as other projects. She has a Masters Degree in Organization Change and Development.
maggiemoorealexander@buildingbeauty.org
Sergio Porta
Professor and Co-founder
Sergio Porta, architect and PhD in Urban Planning, is Professor of Urban Design and Director of UDSU (Urban Design Studies Unit) in the Department of Architecture of the Univ. of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. His research is on Sustainable Urban Design, including masterplanning for adaptive urbanism, urban morphology and evolution, network analysis of urban spatial systems, community based construction process and beauty generation, construction and therapy.
He has published over forty papers on international peer-reviewed journals and two monographs. He sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals of urban science and design and has been invited speaker at various international seminars conferences including UN-Habitat in Geneva and Barcelona, University of Cambridge, UCL London and Venice Biennale.
sergio.porta@buildingbeauty.org
Susan Ingham
Core Faculty Member and Co-founder
Susan Ingham is a licensed architect practicing in Seattle, Washington. Her firm, KASA Architecture, was founded in 2004 and specializes in residential design. The main focus of her work is to try to create environments with beauty where her clients can feel a deep sense of belonging. Susan obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and worked intensively with Christopher Alexander and his colleagues. Susan has given lectures at national and international conferences, and her work has been published in several books and periodicals.
Yodan Rofè
Course Director and Co-founder
Yodan Rofè is a an architect and urban planner with over 20 years professional, teaching and research experience. He was founder and Board Member of the Movement for Israeli Urbanism (MIU) and served for five years as Head of Urban Design at Israel’s Ministry of Construction and Housing. His research interests include the building processes and structure of informal settlements, urban form and movement, accessibility and equity, cognition and feeling in the built environment and urban public space and street design. Together with Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald he authored The Boulevard Book: history, evolution, design of multi-way boulevards published by MIT Press. Recently edited together with Kyriakos Pontikis the book: In Pursuit of a Living Architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander's Quest for a Humane and Sustainable Building Culture published by Common Ground Publishers.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/bidr/SIDEER/MID/Pages/staff/Yodan_Rofe.aspx
https://bgu.academia.edu/YodanRofe
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yodan_Rofe
Christopher R. Andrews
Core Faculty and Co-founder
Christopher Robin Andrews is a licensed architect in the State of California. He chairs Oakland's Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, and is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco's Architecture & Community Design Program. With over 25 years of experience as an architect and urban designer, he brings an understanding of sustainable and culturally competent practice to the full range of environmental design, from the design of carpets and furniture, and architecture at all levels of scale, with a special focus on historic preservation and town planning.
Dan Klyn
Beautiful Software Initiative Faculty
Dan Klyn is an information architect in the United States, and the focus of his consulting firm, The Understanding Group (TUG), is to help make information environments and places made of information that are good for people. Dan holds a bachelor's degree in English language & literature, a master's degree in library and information science, and teaches information architecture to graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information.
In April of 2018, Dan concluded a 2-year term as President of the Information Architecture Institute.
Greg Bryant
Beautiful Software Initiative Faculty
Greg Bryant is computer scientist and engineer with four decades experience, including several decades of bleeding-edge product development in silicon valley. He’s currently on the research faculty of the University of Oregon, and battles administrative managerialism as a member of the university senate. He’s also an urban activist. He co-founded two non-profit special-purpose community centers (a school promoting human-powered transport, and an Argentine tango dancehall), and successfully defunded urban renewal in Eugene, Oregon with a ballot measure — which predictably led to a downtown revival. He worked with Christopher Alexander for about ten years, mostly on pedagogical software and media experiments. He edits Rain Magazine, a journal of grassroots community projects.
Duo Dickinson
Building Beauty Knowledge Exchange Director
Duo Dickinson, Cornell 1977, has built over 700 things. 30 percent of his work is pro bono or at-cost work.
He has received more than 30 awards, has been widely published and given over 100 talks is co-founder of The Congress of Residential Architecture (CORA), he has taught at Yale and Roger Williams College.
Dickinson has written seven books, including The Small House, The House You Build, and A Home Called New England has just been published, and is active in radio and media. He was elected a Fellow in AIA in 2017.
Website: www.duodickinson.com
Blog: https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/duo.dickinson
Twitter: @duodickinson
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duodickinsonarchitect/
Houzz: https://www.houzz.com/pro/duodickinson/duo-dickinson-architect
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duo-dickinson-5aa600b/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/duodickinson/
Or Ettlinger
Or Ettlinger, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and former Associated Member of the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory” at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
His education and experience span the fields of architecture, software engineering, digital imaging, information visualization, and theory of art and architecture. He authored the book The Architecture of Virtual Space and a series of ensuing articles, which formulate a consistent theory of virtuality, and study the history of architectural creations intended for pictorial mediums. He founded and leads the “Creativity Studio”, an interdisciplinary educational framework for expanding creative skills through teamwork on mind-bending design projects.
His current areas of interest are methodologies and neuroscience of artistic creativity, and the search for beauty in art and architecture.
Narendra Dengle
Narendra Dengle is an architect, conservationist, educator, and writer, based in Pune, India. He was one of the founding partners of The GRÜP, New Delhi (1974-87) and is the Principal at Narendra Dengle & Associates since 1987. His practice is evolved around cultural, contextual, and aesthetic issues. His works, consisting of museums, temples, housing, tribal schools, hospitals, hotels and resorts, and educational campuses, carried out in rural and urban areas in India as well as the Sultanate of Oman, have featured in journals of architecture in India, France, South Arica, Italy, China, and the UAE. He has taught at the SPA New Delhi (1974-81), was the Chair of Design at KRVIA Mumbai (2006-11) Mumbai, the Academic Chair at Goa College of Architecture (2012-2014), the Academic Chair at the PVPCOA Pune (2015- 20), and is currently Chairman of the Advisory Board of Goa College of Architecture. He is on the faculty of the Building Beauty Program, at Sant’Anna Institute, Sorrento, Italy since 2018 and Co-Chair of its Asian Advisory Board.
Solo exhibitions of his works and drawings were held in Pune, Mumbai, and Nagpur. He is the author of the books Jharoka (Marathi), 2007, The Discovery of Architecture: a contemporary treatise on ancient values & indigenous realty co-authored with M N Ashish Ganju, 2013, Dialogues with Indian Master Architects 2015, and The Architecture in Maharashtra: Tradition & Journey (2 volumes each in Marathi and English-awaiting publication). He has made films on Architectural Appreciation.
Savyasaachi
Savyasaachi is an independent researcher and professor. He was formerly professor at the Department of Sociology where he taught for thirty years. He has been visiting faculty in the Department of Conservation Architecture, School of Planning and Architecture Delhi; the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat; the National Institute of Design Bangalore 2020; and the Department of Design NIRMA University Ahmedabad. He served as a member of the senate National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Saachi is a member of the governing body Bhoomika Creative Dance Center Delhi; the governing body of “Greha” (A society for growth of knowledge in the fields of development, habitat design and architecture Delhi); advisor to Sehreeti-Development Practices (A non-profit working with community for sustainable development, habitat design, educational and capacity building); and Vice President of Investigating Design (A non-profit that sees design as an everyday phenomenon), which uses design thinking to empower communities for a better future.
Publications: Series Editor (with Ravi Kumar as co-editor) for Social Movements and Transformative Dissent, Routledge, Delhi (three volumes published). Edited Intractable Conflicts in Contemporary India, Routledge, India. Edited Between the Sky and the Earth, a Penguin Book of Forest Writings, Penguin, India. Saachi is also the author of many articles.
Ya'ara Rosner Manor
Ya'ara Rosner Manor is an architect and urban planner with over 15 years of professional experience. She has over a decade of experience in teaching participatory planning, place making and strategic planning. She is the winner of several academic and professional grants and prizes, including the Israeli Planners' Association "Best Researcher" (2013), the President of the State of Israel Scholarship for Innovative Scientific Research (2015) and the Israel Planners' Association ‘Most influential Planners' (2021). Her professional work as well as her research is focused on informal urban structures, and especially on mediating the needs and aspirations of local communities and planning system(s).
Ana Jancar
Ana Jančar is a graduate of the first cohort of the Building Beauty program in Sorrento, Italy (2017-18). She finished her Master’s Degree in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
She works as an urban designer at ADAM Urbanism, a U.K. practice specializing in contextual urban design, which creates beautiful places that respect their local traditional character. She also designs custom-made, unique children’s playgrounds for Zimmer.Obst, a firm that inspires families all over Germany. In her independent architectural projects, she uses Alexander’s design process to create places that unfold from their landscape and local architecture, in ways that make their users feel most at home.
Saman Moein
Saman Moein completed the Building Beauty program in 2017-18, in Sorrento, Italy. He holds a Master's degree in Architecture from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, and is now working as a design builder in the United States. Since graduating from the university, Saman has dedicated his time to learning traditional building crafts. Saman's building experience ranges from fine woodworking, timber framing, structural masonry, and dry stone walling. The projects Saman is involved in bring these various crafts together. In Building Beauty, Saman works with the students as a tutor, helping them through their design and build process.
Jack Cheng
Jack Cheng is a children’s author, Building Beauty alumnus, and former software designer/developer. He holds a BA in Communications Studies (w/ minor in Economics) from the University of Michigan and is currently a Michigan State University Extension Master Gardener trainee. He lives in Detroit.
As a Building Beauty student, Jack worked in his community and shared his experience on his blog. His progress through the course can be found on our Student Work page under the “2022-23 Student Work examples” heading.
Julian Lang
Hello, I’m Julian. Born in South Africa and raised in England, I have returned to South Africa, where I currently reside. I pursued an undergraduate degree in Architecture, which left me both inspired to create and disillusioned by the conventional structures around me. Seeking a new direction, I followed my passion for hands-on experience by working in construction and travelling to learn various natural building and vernacular techniques.
To deepen my understanding and expand my impact, I enrolled in the MA Ecological Design Thinking program at Schumacher College. This program began to equip me with the skills to scale and transform regenerative cultures through a living systems approach, aiming to benefit all beings. It was during this time that I discovered "The Nature of Order" by Christopher Alexander. His process of unfolding based on feeling resonated deeply with me, integrating my past experiences, and offered the meaningful and pragmatic approach to design that I had been seeking.
I had the privilege of participating in the first Building Beauty Online course, which provided an excellent opportunity to blend theory with practice within a community of like-minded individuals. The feedback and support were invaluable for my personal development. After the course, I remained connected with the community through the Atelier, where I continued to learn from others and receive feedback on my design and build projects.
Currently, I work as a designer and maker striving to incorporate everything I have learned into my projects. I am committed to expanding my skills and practicing with a deeper presence to what is unfolding with a head, heart and hands approach. Since 2023, I have been assisting in the Design and Construction Studio program, a role that has been both enjoyable and enriching. This spring, I will also assist in the Construction Experience program.
