On Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism:

"This book will durably change the paradigm by which we have viewed Louis Kahn now for several decades."
-- Francesco Passanti

"This book offers a refreshingly new reading of Louis Kahn...far from being a solitary genius, Kahn was deeply involved in the discourse of his time, searching for an architecture that would foster community within a democratic society."
-- Alan Colquhoun, Princeton University

"This book attempts to re-define Modernism through Kahn, and one cannot help having sympathy and respect for the attitudes expressed in such a unique work."
-- Hiroshi Matsukama, A+U

On Anxious Modernisms:

"This book gracefully and intelligently refutes the perception of 'the several decades of architectural culture that followed the Second World War as an interregnum between an expiring modernism and a dawning postmodernism.'"
-- John Morris Dixon, ARQ

"Goldhagen proposes an interesting framework for analysis that accounts for both the Modern Movement's historical reality and its complexity." --Hilde Heynen, Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement



Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a leading figure in the understanding and interpretation of modern and contemporary architecture. Scholar, critic, teacher, and advisor, Goldhagen is deeply committed to enhancing the intellectual, aesthetic, and social lives of people by shaping people's understanding of the built environment as well as its design. Believing that architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design demands and deserves multifaceted, high-level, and accessible analysis and explication, she addresses designers and the broader public with intellectually sophisticated, linguistically clear writing.

click here to learn more



Seeing the Building for the Trees
2012/01 - The New York Times

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.


click here to download the article as a .pdf



Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism

Louis Kahn is perhaps the most important architect to emerge in the decades following World War II. In this book Goldhagen dismantles the myths that have cast Kahn variously as a mystical neo-Platonist, a structural rationalist, a visionary champion of Beaux-Arts principles, and a rebel against modernism. She demonstrates instead that the essence of Kahn's architecture lies in his deeply help modernist political, social and artistic ideals. Goldhagen shows that Kahn, throughout his life, sought to reconceptualize modernism to make a socially transformative architecture for the postwar world.

click here to learn more