Sarah Williams Goldhagen

NEW BOOK:

Welcome to Your World:
How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives
On Sale April 11, 2017
Drawing on new discoveries in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, one of the nation’s chief architecture critics, reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience.

“Sarah Williams Goldhagen's book lays the groundwork for the cognitive neuroscience of architecture.” —Terrence J. Senjowski, Francis Crick Chair, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, The Salk Institute

"Sarah Goldhagen brilliantly prompts the allegory of "blindsight" to show how the recent findings of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology can become the basis for a thoroughgoing paradigm shift in the understanding and construction of the built environment. In explaining the connection between human experience and the world as an embodied phenomenon, she reconfigures the foundations of thinking that have dominated the scholarly, design, and building professions. But she does more: bringing the sciences deep into the humanities, she reconceptualizes our understanding of the built environment's profound effects on individuals, communities, and societies." —Nader Tehrani, Dean, Cooper Union School of Architecture