Sarah Williams Goldhagen: Welcome to Your World


About Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Sarah Williams Goldhagen taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for ten years and was the New Republic’s architecture critic until recently. Currently a contributing editor at Art in America and Architectural Record, she is an award-winning writer who has written about buildings, cities, and landscapes for many national and international publications, including the New York Times, the American Prospect, and Harvard DesignMagazine. She lives in New York City.

(from HarperCollins)

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Though it's been a century and a half since the world started standardizing how we make spaces safe, we've agreed on the ideal height for ceilings, the width of doors, the slope of stairs, we've given a lot less thought to the emotional and psychological impact of buildings.



Goldhagen: To call it an art, mistakenly casts it as a luxury good and it's not. It's more and more clear that the things that we experience in the built environment profoundly affect our mental health, our emotional health, our physical health, the way children learn, the way children develop and it's grotesquely neglected.

AJC: It sounds like you're talking about a civil right rather than an art form.



Goldhagen: People realize that it wasn't all these disaggregated elements it was an ecosystem, it was one system that we all inhabited and instead of calling nature nature we tend to call it now the environment. And what we need to understand now is the kind of importance that we all accord now to the environment is the kind of importance that we need to accord to the built environment because the built environment is in fact what most of us inhabit most of the time and it's having an impact on us in all sorts of ways that people don't appreciate.

It may sound abstract but the subtle impacts of the built environment on humans are numerous, profound, and well documented. One study measured a spike in heart right and cortisol levels in people who walked through a featureless part of town, demonstrating the built environment's ability to add subconscious stress to our lives. Other studies saw patients in hospital rooms with a garden view recover from surgery faster and with less pain than their counterparts in rooms without a view. But Goldhagen says that for architects to leverage all this knowledge they'll need to radically and fundamentally change the way they approach their craft.


And Goldhagen herself has noticed many thoughtful designs abroad and at home. One example the Via Verde sustainable housing project in the Bronx that presents a strong model for responsible community conscious architecture. Further south in Philadelphia there's Dilworth Plaza where in 2014 three different firms were tasked with transforming the space around city hall from a menacing series of dark alleyways to a vibrant, uplifting center square. James Timberlake, whose firm's most recent accomplishments include the U.S. Embassy in London, was one of the architects who embraced the challenge of building joy into a previously dour public space.

James Timberlake: That's been one of the great shifts in our country in the last you know 18 to 20 years is that recognition that we can't gate everything we can't wall up everything but we need to open up some of these spaces to not only public expression but public use. I think Sarah Goldhagen's book somewhat refers to that and when she starts talking about the impact of our public realms on our psyches and our spirit and how we engage that and how use it and you can see it on a day to day basis in Dilworth Plaza.


Goldhagen: I do think that some things that are initially difficult for people to comprehend and not beautiful can end up being appreciated as aesthetically powerful so beauty doesn't always have to be something that's just immediately pleasing.

AJC: Doesn't have to be pretty?

Goldhagen: Right, pretty is the word that I, it doesn't have to be pretty because one of the things we know we need from our environments is challenge. We want our expectations to be subverted, we want to go oh wait a minute, I didn't know I could stand on a bridge made of glass and look down. So is it beautiful? I don't know, it's a little unsettling but it's pretty cool too and it makes me think about my environment and my relationship to this city in a really different way.
