Speakers

Sarah Goldhagen

Architecture Critic
The New Republic

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, scholar, critic, teacher, and adviser, is a leading figure in the understanding and interpretation of modern and contemporary architecture. As Architecture Critic for The New Republic, for which she has recently launched an online column, The Place, Goldhagen explores and explicates the nature of architectural experience as it relates to the artistic, political, ethical, and social aspects of modern and contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. She is the author of Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, the editor of, and a contributor to, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, and has written essays on a wide range of practitioners from Alvar Aalto to Peter Zumthor, and on a wide range of topics, from monumentality, to the relationship of architectural design to photography, to the contemporary crisis in America’s infrastructure, to the renaissance of the great urban park. Goldhagen has taught at several major universities and colleges, including, for a decade, at Harvard’s Design School. Her teaching at Harvard and elsewhere helped shape how a generation of students came to understand the intertwined historical, social, and aesthetic dimensions of the modern and contemporary built environment. Goldhagen is currently working on a book on architectural experience for Harper/Collins.