Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, PhD. (Columbia University) and former Harvard professor, writes, lectures, and consults for a wide range of public and private clients on human centered design for the built environment. Her Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (HarperCollins; also published in Chinese, Russian, and Korean) won a Nautilus Book Award in 2017 for its contribution to social and environmental justice, and Goldhagen was an opening-night Spotlight speaker at the AIA National Convention that same year.

A frequent keynote speaker, Goldhagen has won numerous awards and grants (including three from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts) for her writing on modern and contemporary architecture and landscapes and their psychological and cognitive effects on people. She has published several opinion pieces in the New York Times, served as Contributing Editor for Art in America and Architectural Record, and was the New Republic’s architecture critic for nearly a decade. Goldhagen also has had a distinguished academic career with scholarly publications that include Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (Yale University) and Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (co-edited with Réjean Legault, MIT Press) as well as numerous essays and reviews in premier architecture- and art-historical journals.

Currently she sits on the Board of the Van Alen Institute, works closely with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), and advises various clients on strategies for promoting and implementing human centered design.