Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives

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. A must-read!” (NADER TEHRANI, AWARD-WINNING ARCHITECT AND DEAN OF THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT COOPER UNION. 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 D

This brilliant book opened my eyes to the world around me This brilliant book opened my eyes to the world around me and helped me see my environment in new ways. Goldhagen is advocating for better design, design that is more human-centric and connects us to nature. She's a former professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. hana k said A breakthrough in architectural theory!. A real breakthrough in architectural theory, Sarah Williams Goldhagen has brought to light and articulated clearly what many of us may know by intuition: Design matters and it affects peoples' well-being and lives well beyond the attention it is given. This book is wri. Jason D Andreas said Excellent Study in Environmental Architecture!. Welcome To Your World is an excellent study in the environment around us - how it effects us, how it shapes our feelings, how it impacts our wellbeing. You don't have to be an architect, designer or builder to understand the incredibly interesting examples that Mrs. Go

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. 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. 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 Ameri

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 Architectural Record, she is an award-winning writer who has written for many national and international publications, including the New York Times, American Prospect, Art in America, Harvard Design Magazine, Landscape Arc