Excerpts from Chapters 2 and 4 of Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, by RECORD contributor Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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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From the Stacks: Santiago Calatrava’s Overrated Architecture
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…
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…
Making Waves
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…
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…
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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