October 30, 2017 The Nation.^51likely to be siphoned off into the pockets of
corrupt foreign officials as they are to help
feed starving orphans.I
could have been one of the kids in
that photo. I am entirely a product
of the United Nations: Both my par-
ents spent the majority of their careers
working there, I attended UN-adjacent
schools, and I spent sick days wandering
the halls of the Secretariat in Geneva and
marveling at the building’s hidden doors
and sonorous hallways.
I’ve also spent my whole life in UN cit-
ies: Geneva, Paris (home to UNESCO and
other agencies), and New York. Today, I call
the UN my country and New York City my
home—yet I’ve also grown sympathetic to
the idea that New York in particular brings
out the worst in UN people: vanity, self-
importance, snobbery (these are qualities
that New Yorkers and international civil
servants share, to some degree). At the same
time, the UN feeds New Yorkers’ cosmo-
politan provincialism: the feeling that New
York is, in some sense, its own country.
Hanlon casts the symbiotic relationship
between the organization and the city as a
net positive: In good times and bad, the UN
would not be the UN without New York,
and vice versa. But while she’s absolutely
right in pointing out that the relationship is
mutually beneficial, there’s also a compel-
ling argument to be made that it would have
been better for the city, the country, and the
world—not to mention for the organization
itself—if the United Nations had taken
up the Great Smoky Mountains on their
original bid.
Would we have world peace? Probably
not. Would the enthusiastic international-
ism of the postwar years have prevailed? It’s
impossible to tell. Would Donald Trump
be president? At the very least, his renova-
tion contractors would have been out of a
gig. It’s not particularly useful to dwell on
these hypotheticals, but it’s still hard not to
wonder where we’d be had the UN settled
in a red state or a rural region, and shared
its considerable institutional gifts—multi-
cultural values, a sense of engagement with
what’s happening abroad, and, crucially,
lots and lots of jobs—with a host city that
resembled its country far more than New
York ever will.
That’s why it’s a shame that the UN
made its headquarters in a city that was
already about as worldly as can be. Forgive
the arrogance, but: We don’t really need it.
And the UN? It doesn’t much need New
York, either. QD
e gustibus non est disputandum is clear-
ly not Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s
motto. She is quite happy to dispute
matters of taste, at least so far as ar-
chitecture is concerned, and has just
written an entire book intended to do just
that: to tell people that much of what they
think they like is doing them no good, and
that a better-designed environment would
make their lives more satisfying.
There are many ways in which to read We l -
come to Your World: How the Built Environment
Shapes Our Lives. The least charitable is to
take Goldhagen as a bit of a scold. After all, in
the opening pages of this long and thorough
treatise, she tells us that the problem with how
we understand architecture “is an information
deficit. If people understand just how much
design matters, they’d care.” But we can also
read her admonishments as representative
of her ambitions here: Goldhagen believes
that she is coming to us with news of recent
scientific discoveries that will change the way
we think about and experience buildings. “As
you read what follows, what you know and
how you think about your world will shift,”she writes. “It will become a different place
than it was before you opened to this page.”
Clearly, Goldhagen is not a writer who
approaches her subject with a sense of tenta-
tiveness. But once you get a little deeper into
this book, it becomes clear that her hubris (if
we can call it that) coexists with a sense of ear-
nestness and civilizing intentions. Goldhagen
is an engaging and generous writer, alert to
the subtleties of human experience, and she
has written Welcome to Your World with a de-
sire to genuinely reveal something new to us
about how cities, buildings, and places affect
us. Armed with relatively recent discoveries
in neuroscience, Goldhagen wants to give us
a scientific explanation about how and why
people experience different kinds of rooms,
different kinds of colors and materials and
textures, and different kinds of streets and
cities in widely varying ways. If, until now,
we—architects, critics, building dwellers—
have had to guess what makes certain places
attractive or comfortable or exciting or awe-
inspiring, we now have some scientific basisby PAUL GOLDBERGER
A SHIMMERY CUBE
What is the science behind how we experience architecture?
Welcome to Your World
How the Built Environment
Shapes Our Lives
By Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Harper. 384 pp. $40Paul Goldberger is the author, most recently, of
Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank
Gehry.UK pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.AP PHOTO / EUGENE HOSHIKO