Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Author, Architecture Critic

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March 6, 2017 By Sarah Goldhagen

URBAN PASTORALS

Art in America

Designs for three major New York parks reconfigure the experience of city life in the twenty-first century.

WATER CITY

Once finished, any change in the built environment has a way of settling in quickly to become the new normal. A new park or high-rise or bridge takes so long to build that we get habituated to its existence within months of its official opening, indeed sometimes days after the construction workers clear away the orange cones or peel the protective film off glass doors.
 
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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

From the Stacks: Santiago Calatrava’s Overrated Architecture

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The New Republic

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has come under a storm of criticism, most recently in yesterday’s New York Times, for ambitious projects that come in wildly over-budget and in need of repairs. In this 2006 essay, Sarah Williams Goldhagen critiqued the star architect as kitsch, “and not even well-considered kitsch … Taken in the twenty-year aggregate of his career, Calatrava’s work…

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

Stopped Making Sense

The New Republic

To build a building is hard; to criticize a building is, by comparison, easy. For a serious critic, the impulse to write uncomplimentary things should always provoke a bout of preliminary introspection. Does one write from the lofty principle that truth must be spoken to power, or at least to fashion? Will the reader come away from this exercise in scorching criticism of buildings and urban spaces…

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

Making Waves

The New Republic

Meet Enrique Miralles, the real Frank Gehry.

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

American Collapse

The New Republic

Within fourteen days of each other, two rush-hour calamities: a bridge collapse and a steam-pipe explosion. In Minneapolis, a forty-year-old bridge along highway I-35W suddenly dropped sixty feet into the Mississippi River, killing at least five people and injuring approximately one hundred more. The federal government had deemed the bridge structurally deficient in 1990, which the Minnesota Depar…

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

When Did Architecture’s Top Prize Become So Predictable and Boring?

The New Republic
Recently, the Pritzker Committee held the award ceremony for its annual prize, which this year went to Eduardo Souto de Moura, a Portuguese architect revered among architecture’s global, academic elite and virtually unknown to the public. Like the work of other Pritzker winners, such as the Swiss Peter Zumthor and the Australian Glen Murcutt, Souto de Moura’s rigorously composed, meticulously det…

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

How Steve Jobs Turned Design Into a Necessity

The New Republic
The Apple CEO understood aspects of designs that no one else did.

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

November 29, 2016 By Sarah Goldhagen

The Beauty and Inhumanity of Oscar Niemeyer’s Architecture

The New Republic

Don’t believe it when you read that Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect who died this week only days before he would have turned 105, was the one who took the chill off modernist design with his flamboyantly curving, white thin-shell concrete buildings. That’s the sort of nonsense that gets peddled in obituaries and haigiographies, particularly when a charismatic charmer distorts the historic…

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Filed Under: ARCHITECTURE, Criticism

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  • ARCHITECTURE (20)
  • Criticism (24)
  • History (6)
  • Landscape (1)
  • THEORY (1)
  • Uncategorized (1)
  • URBAN DESIGN/ CITY PLANNING (1)

Recent Posts

Excerpts from ‘Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives’

URBAN PASTORALS

From the Stacks: Santiago Calatrava’s Overrated Architecture

Stopped Making Sense

Making Waves

American Collapse

When Did Architecture’s Top Prize Become So Predictable and Boring?

How Steve Jobs Turned Design Into a Necessity

The Beauty and Inhumanity of Oscar Niemeyer’s Architecture

Architecture is More Than Just Buildings: In Remembrance of Ada Louise Huxtable

Shigeru Ban: Winner of the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Frank Lloyd Wright Was a Genius at Building Houses, But His Ideas for Cities Were Terrible

Place of Grace

Reason to be Cheerful

Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Architecture: Extra-Large

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