I've been going to work for more than 30 years. In my 20s, I was a television news producer. In my 30s, fresh out of architecture school, I ran redevelopment projects in my home city of Portland, Oregon. Through my 40s, I was hired by a couple of nearby suburbs to lead municipal planning and public works departments, and I returned to the City of Portland in my mid-50s to play out my career in public service. Or so I thought. Like so many others in 2025, I learned that my

In graduate school in the late 1990’s, I fell hard for Christopher Alexander. Fell as hard as a person can fall, short of falling in...