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 critic, theorist, and historian of modern and contemporary architecture. Her articles have been published in The New Republic, The American Prospect, Art in America, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Metropolis, The New York Times, and World Architecture (UK).  She has also contributed to scholarly publications such as Assemblage, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.



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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Stopped Making Sense
2008/04 - 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 with a heightened appreciation for the built environment and its importance to our daily lives?
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Making Waves
2008/02 - The New Republic
For well over a decade now, we have been flipping through glossy photographs and watching videos of Frank Gehry carefully studying crumpled wads of paper, selecting which one to slide across some large drawing table to an assistant-in-waiting, who will scan it into the computer and, with Gehry, endeavor to make and call it architecture. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao celebrated its tenth anniversary this fall with a group of exhibits as self-congratulatory as the fanfare surrounding Gehry's most recently completed project, his IAC (Inter-Active Corp) Building on the west side of Manhattan.
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Ultraviolet: Alvar Aalto's Embodied Rationalism
Fall 2007 - Harvard Design Magazine
In the story of Modernism, told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted, Alvar Aalto is often treated as the most important early Modernist who doesn't fit. The mainstream, nearly filmic narrative begins with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and then, in a series of cuts, presents a central cast of characters in which Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud (sometimes), and Walter Gropius play leading roles. Afterwards, separately, comes the short on Aalto.
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Legacy-Builder
2007/09 - The New Republic
Now right-thinking people who stand at any place on the political spectrum can say that, in one instance at least, President Bush has demonstrated judgment superior to that of his father. Only twelve presidential libraries grace our land, all run with public funding by the National Archives and Records Administration. The first president to be honored with this by now de rigueur monument to posterity...
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American Collapse
2007/08 - 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.
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Project Runway
2007/02 - The New Republic
Fashion and architecture share certain ideas and methods, and they may even draw inspiration from similar sources. But they are not exactly "parallel practices," as a new exhibition claims.
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Dorm Art
2006/11 - The New Republic
The campus student center is always a grab-bag of a building, forcing a hodgepodge of functions--fitness centers, auditoriums, eating areas--into a single, often unwieldy design. But two new centers, at the University of Cincinnati and Wellesley College, create a dynamic and yet unified atmosphere by putting the human experience first.
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Extra Large
2006/07 - The New Republic
Rem Koolhaas, with his visionary conception of architecture and urban design, has redirected the architectural thought and practices of a generation. But the boldest manifestations of his theories--gargantuan master plans that deliberately flout their surroundings--invite a troubling question: Does Koolhaas have any interest in creating useable public spaces? Does he care about people?
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For The Birds
2006/01 - The New Republic
The easy symbolism of Santiago Calatrava's buildings--a planetarium that looks like an eye, a transportation hub that suggests a bird in flight--has made him one of today's most popular architects. But this kitschy reliance on natural forms ignores the real demands of contemporary civic architecture.
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Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style
2005/06 - JSAH
Modernism in architecture is not, and never was, a style, but rather an ongoing discussion among geographically dispersed practitioners about the ideal role of architecture in modern society and culture.
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The Production of Locality in Josep Luis Sert's Peabody Terrace
2005/05 - Harvard Design Magazine
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Profile in Metropolis
2003/08 - Metropolis
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Multiple Failures of Architecture Education
2003/01 - The Chronicle Review
"Who's to blame for the lackluster designs of our nation's urban spaces-the architects, their clients, or the education system that taught them all?"
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Boring Buildings
2001/12 - The American Prospect
Why is American Architecture so Bad?
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Review of Mark Wigley's White Walls, Designer Dresses
1997/03 - JSAH
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