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Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives Hardcover – April 11, 2017
One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience
Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs.
By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important.
Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.
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Print length384 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherHarper
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Publication dateApril 11, 2017
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Dimensions1.4 x 6.4 x 8.8 inches
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ISBN-100061957801
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ISBN-13978-0061957802
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“[Goldhagen’s] analysis is practical and accessible…. A valuable compendium to design analysis and the benefits of progress in contemporary design. An eye-opening look at the ways in which carefully planned and executed design and architecture can expand cognitive faculties and improve daily life.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Goldhagen’s fresh perspective is deep, exciting, and optimistic.” — Booklist
“Goldhagen’s book lays the groundwork for the cognitive neuroscience of architecture.” — Terrence Sejnowski, Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
“[A} feast for the mind…[with] a vital message: We can and must capitalize on this new knowledge to build more human-centered urban environments. It’s a call to action we ignore at our peril.” — Colin Ellard, author of Places of The Heart and You Are Here
“Goldhagen’s illuminating book on the design of our world begins just where it should, with us and how we live, not with a dazzling shell. She shows us many ways that good design can uplift our lives and how poor design can fail us.” — Barbara Tversky, Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University
“A remarkable book and a fascinating exploration of the human experience in the city. Ground breaking, informed, and inspired.” — Mikyoung Kim, Landscape Architect
“Welcome to Your World will go far to help us create healthy, equitable, and thriving cities. This is extremely powerful stuff.” — Faith Rose, former Executive Director of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York Faith Rose, former Executive Director of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York
“Lucidly written in beautiful prose, Welcome to Your World will stimulate and delight professionals, students, and nonprofessionals alike. A must-read!” — NADER TEHRANI, AWARD-WINNING ARCHITECT AND DEAN OF THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT COOPER UNION
“Rarely does a book come along where its very premise is to stop you in your tracks, compel you to look around, take account of where you are standing… [Welcome to Your World] is one of those ‘stop and smell the roses’ experiences.” — Huffington Post
From the Back Cover
One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience.
Taking an illuminating journey around the globe and into the brain, Welcome to Your World reveals that the built environment and its design matter far more than anybody, even architects, ever thought they did. Using cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology, Sarah Williams Goldhagen articulates the ways in which a room, a building, or a city square affects us, and details our reactions to form, pattern, light, color, sound, texture, and more.
Expanding on these concepts, she walks us through some of the world’s best and worst buildings, landscapes, and cityscapes, from the Parthenon in Athens to One World Trade Center in Manhattan, from Amiens Cathedral in France to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris to the 798 Art District in Beijing. Supported by overwhelming evidence and clear-eyed analysis, she concludes that societies must reconsider what and how they build. Put simply: it requires the same resources to construct a building that impairs our capabilities as it does to erect a structure that enhances them. Ultimately the stakes—individual need and collective welfare—could not be higher.
Erudite, wise, and beautifully illustrated with more than 150 color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.
About the Author
Sarah Williams Goldhagen taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for ten years and was the New Republic’s architecture critic until recently. Currently a contributing editor at Art in America and Architectural Record, she is an award-winning writer who has written about buildings, cities, and landscapes for many national and international publications, including the New York Times, the American Prospect, and Harvard Design Magazine. She lives in New York City.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; Frist Edition (April 11, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061957801
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061957802
- Item Weight : 2.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 1.4 x 6.4 x 8.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #599,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #176 in Architectural Criticism
- #278 in Urban & Land Use Planning (Books)
- #413 in Architectural Drafting & Presentation
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Architecture and landscapes, cities and urban design, infrastructure and public art -- all these constitute the built environment. That's what I write about. The things of the world outlast us.
For me, also, writing well, and authenticity of voice matters.
Before devoting myself full-time to writing, I taught for ten years at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and have also taught at UT Austin and at Wellesley and Vassar Colleges. Between books, I've published a raft of essays, some of them award-winning, many of them as the New Republic’s architecture critic. Currently I am currently a Contributing Editor at both Art in America and Architectural Record.
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives makes the case that buildings and urban spaces impact us whether we pay any attention to them or not — and impact us for the worse because we pay so little attention. She cites studies to document that people are actually more open to creative new concepts when they are in rooms with higher ceilings, that good design can create positive emotions and consequently positive human relations, can improve our physical health, childhood development, intelligence, life expectancy, and creativity.
The elements of a built environment that Goldhagen points to as impacting these things include visual elements, color, light, and the form of a structure, but also sound, smell, texture, materials, temperatures, incorporation of nature, and natural materials and forms, integration of architecture with landscape design, and the degree of crowding or lack thereof.
While a shack built of found materials in the median of a highway can be improved only so much, and a McMansion designed by a realtor can be only so horrible, Goldhagen makes a case that what she is advocating is not as much a question of cost as one might think, that better designs can cost as little as worse ones in many cases, and that today’s technologies make it far easier than it used to be to create buildings with well-designed and curving and irregular shapes rather than simple boxes.
It seems to me that we ought to be struck by and resentful of the fact that most new automobiles are created with well-designed and complex forms, while a Frank Gehry building still stands out as a sort of freak creation in the realm of permanent structures. There are many car bodies that, if I could enlarge them to the proper scale, I would much rather live or work in than in most buildings being put up in U.S. cities, towns, and sprawl. Goldhagen’s book provides numerous examples of good and bad design from around the world.
What does she propose that we do about it? She suggests that everything built be designed by a properly trained designer — a project that certainly cries out for an organization to get behind it and begin drafting legislation, codes, and standards. She also proposes that the lessons in her book be taught in design schools, and that the public at large learn these lessons so as to overcome the common preference for the familiar, which Goldhagen argues can sometimes override a preference for the demonstrably better.
Goldhagen’s arguments claim to rest on a body of knowledge that I lack any ability to judge because it’s neuroscience and I’m not a neuroscientist. However, I will dare to state what seems available to the outsider, namely that references to neuroscience are often both less necessary and less definitive than is imagined — and that seems to be the case here.
I think neuroscience is less necessary here than Goldhagen seems to believe, because the impact of the built environment is less inaccessible to our conscious minds than Goldhagen at times suggests. Goldhagen refers to “the cognitive revolution’s complete rethinking of human experience” before citing numerous examples of past architects apparently already understanding the future “revolution.” Our “surroundings,” she writes, “affect us much more viscerally and profoundly than we could possibly be aware of, because most of our cognitions, including those about where we are, happen outside our conscious awareness.” But that concept is not strictly new, and people’s levels of awareness of how the physical world is impacting them seems to vary a great deal, both from person to person and from moment to moment.
Alvar Aalto, Goldhagen writes, “intuited” that looking at a handrail made of wood can create a feeling of warmth. Because he didn’t observe this thought in a brain under a microscope, he merely “intuited” it in his own brain. Frank Lloyd Wright had similar intuitions about hexagonal spaces, Goldhagen tells us.
Many people, Goldhagen writes, dislike Yale’s Art and Architecture building because they “nonconsciously” imagine that its rough surfaces would hurt if brushed up against. That hardly strikes me as a thought that no one could become conscious of — and certainly not after Goldhagen has pointed it out. I also doubt she found it in a laboratory. Similary, she writes that visitors to a church or a hotel may never become consciously aware of the sounds their feet are making because of the material chosen for the floor. Then again, they may.
I don’t mean to discount Goldhagen’s insights, but I’d like to see people encouraged to expand their awareness, more than to study the brain’s mysteries as taught to them by scientists. Those teachings may be less decisive than is often imagined. To treat a manner in which people experience the world as permanent simply because some of the locations in which it occurs in their brains have been identified, seems like a fallacy to me. Experiences change, and so does brain activity.
Richard Neutra’s theory about how signs of a building’s construction will be experienced by those inhabiting the finished project is “all but confirmed” by the discovery of certain neurons, Golhagen believes. But wasn’t the theory confirmed by Neutra’s clients? And didn’t we know their experience was happening in their brains, as opposed to in some other organ, even prior to naming some neurons?
We’re supposed to learn, as if brand new knowledge, from the “cognitive revolution” that surfaces and materials impact our “nonconscious and conscious cognitions about the built environment.” Fine. You’ll get no argument from me, primarily because I have to run change my kid’s diaper because he has no idea why he’s grumpy. Yes, of course, it’s more complex than that example, I just think there’s a little hyping being added to the insights.
Now, to a more serious problem. Goldhagen uses predictions of population growth and urbanization to predict that by 2050 an additional 2.4 billion people will need spaces built for them to live and work in. I find it hard to believe that any quality of design of which this species is capable can make that level of growth survivable. The accompanying destruction of ecosystems and climate seems insurmountable. That’s no argument for not trying to do the very best job of it possible, with an emphasis on the least damaging construction as well as on the best aesthetics. But it is an argument for putting a huge emphasis on preventing that population expansion.
Photo: Scottish Parliament.
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Das imm Schlusskapitel geäußerte Vertrauen der Autorin in obligatorische bauvorbereitende (Design-)Expertengremien unter Hinweis auf das Beispiel Niederlande wäre in jedem Falle noch zu konfrontieren mit den historischen Erfahrungen, mit der Bedeutung der Architekturmoden und nicht zuletzt mit den eigentlich entscheidenden, zugleich ganz profanen praktischen Fragen im Alltag: Wie werden die sich ergebenden Zielkonflikte tatsächlich aufgelöst? Wer entscheidet, was als schön zu gelten hat? Wer soll das alles bezahlen?
Ich hätte mir auch mehr Denkanstöße gewünscht, etwa zu denkbaren Verbesserungen bei der Visualisierung und Fühlbarmachung von Architekturmodellen, für den gesetzgeberischen Rahmen der allgemeinen Städtebauplanung, für die konkrete Rolle des Architekten etwa bei der Ökonomisierung der Entwurfsprozesse (Stichwort Fertighaus und Investorenarchitektur, Umnutzungskonzepte etc.), die stärkere Verankerung des Gemeinwohlgedankens bei der Baurealisierung etc. Nicht einmal Ansätze dazu findet man.
Insgesamt aber auf jeden Fall ein ehrliches und engagiertes, in jeder Hinsicht gut gemeintes Buch. Abschließend entschuldigung für diese respektlose Rezension der Publikation einer Harvard-Professorin, aber das ist gelebte Demokratie.