Architecture Critic, Author Sarah Goldhagen to Present Lectures on Feb. 8 and 9

Photo Submitted

This is the frontispiece to Sarah Goldhagen's essay on Alvar Aalto in "Aalto and America" (Yale University Press, 2012), edited by Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske and David Fixler.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Sarah Williams Goldhagen will present a lecture titled “How to Judge a Building: Critical Criteria” at 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 9, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series.

Goldhagen is a theorist, critic and historian of modern and contemporary architecture. She recently served as the New Republic’s architecture critic for eight years.

Goldhagen received a doctorate from Columbia University’s Department of Art History. Before devoting herself to writing full-time, she taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for 10 years, as well as at Wellesley College,Vassar College and the University of Texas at Austin. She travels and delivers lectures at universities around the world on the topics of modern and contemporary architecture, landscape architecture and urban design.

She is the author of Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (Yale University Press, 2001) and the editor, with Réjean Legault, of Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (MIT Press, 2001). She is currently writing a book on the experience of the contemporary built environment. Her essays and articles have appeared in Design Observer, The New York Times and other publications.

She believes that it not only is possible but also is an ethical obligation to judge the quality or design of a building, since most interventions constructed in the environment are meant to last for generations. In this lecture, she will propose criteria for architectural judgment that are grounded in the findings of recent psychological and scientific research on the nature and structure of human cognition.

The public is invited to attend this lecture. Admission is free, with limited seating. For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.

In addition to her talk at the university, Goldhagen will present a lecture at 5 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 8, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. Admission is $10, or free to museum members. She will provide tools for looking at how the design of buildings in public spaces shapes the individual and the collective, both private and social lives. She is featured in Global Citizen, a book about the work and career of Moshe Safdie, the architect for Crystal Bridges Museum. She will focus her commentary on Safdie’s design, as well as the museum’s acquisition of a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bachman Wilson House.