Welcome to Your World, Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Welcome to Your World, Sarah Williams Goldhagen
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Welcome to Your World
How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives

Author: Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Narrator: Andrea Gallo

Unabridged: 9 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 04/11/2017


Synopsis

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.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 Sarah Williams Goldhagen

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicole on December 03, 2017

This is one of those non-fiction books which has enough interesting information to make a really interesting long form article but not enough for a whole book. I found a couple passages really interesting but the vast majority of the book is just repeating the same ideas over and over again so the i......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on June 30, 2017

This is a passionate and well written discussion of why design and architecture matter and how it would improve our society to assign good design a more important role in contemporary America as so much work here is poorly built (much by developers who only care about building cheaply and personal p......more

Goodreads review by Kristie on July 16, 2017

I absolutely devour books about community, infrastructure and the "built" world. This book was such a light-weight on all of those levels, I was unable to finish it.......more

Goodreads review by Phil on January 30, 2018

I really enjoyed the description of how good design help buildings drastically improve our experiences and our lives. The case studies were also excellent. The studies of buildings that I've visited before were especially vivid, but the images in the print edition allowed me some insight into those......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on October 20, 2017

Fascinating! This would be an interesting read for anyone curious about the effects that built environments have on the people who inhabit them. As an architect, this book gave me much to think about, and having just finished it, I feel like I should read it again to pick up more of the info I proba......more