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, a historian and theorist of modern architecture, is The New Republic's architecture critic. Before deciding to devote herself full-time to writing, she was, for ten years, a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. She writes books, lectures nationally and internationally, and consults to cultural and other institutions on the architect selection process. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The American Prospect, and Art In America, and she has contributed scholarly essays to many publications, including Assemblage, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Goldhagen is a co-founder and co-editor of a new scholarly journal, Positions: On Modern Architecture and Urbanism/ Histories and Theories.



Reason to be Cheerful
2008/08 - The New Republic

The Pritzker Architecture Prize is commonly described as "the Nobel Prize of architecture." It was indeed modeled on the Nobel, and its winners, like Nobel laureates, receive a bronze medal and a cash award. Yet the imputed equivalence between the two prizes is misleading. Alfred Nobel created his prize to reward specific and identifiable accomplishments that advance knowledge or create new lines of inquiry in a given field. (Leave aside the Peace Prize, which is a more complicated affair.)

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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.

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Addressing a Structural Deficiency

An architectural historian has a plan to save
nation's aging infrastructure

Our infrastructure isn't the work of a criminal, but it's a kind of crime. Much of it is a disaster waiting to happen, or already happening. "These are not discrete events," says Goldhagen.

What, exactly, is infrastructure? For Goldhagen, it's everything we build that is meant to serve the public: highways, streets, bridges, tunnels, sidewalks, transit systems, utilities of all kinds, parks, soccer fields, even public schools and colleges. She says we need to think of it all as one integrated whole, and then ask who's taking care of it. No one, it turns out. Her facts are frightening...

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