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
