52 The Nation. October 30, 2017
for our reactions: what Goldhagen calls a new
paradigm, which “holds that much of what
and how people think is a function of our liv-
ing in the kinds of bodies we do.”
A
mong the many examples provided
in Welcome to Your World, Goldhagen
cites a pair of temporary pavilions
built in 2010 that she believes are
particularly instructive. One is in
London’s Hyde Park, by the architect Jean
Nouvel; the other is on the grounds of the
Shanghai World Expo, by the designer and
architect Thomas Heatherwick. Nouvel’s
pavilion was that year’s iteration of an an-
nual project by the Serpentine Gallery in
which a prominent architect who has never
constructed a building in Britain is invited to
design a summer pavilion in the park. What
Nouvel came up with was starkly angular
and bright red, an abstraction of diagonal,
slanted walls intended, the architect said,
to evoke the setting summer sun. Heather-
wick’s design, a shimmering cube made up
of 60,000 extruded Plexiglas rods, looked
even less like a conventional building and
more like a glowing porcupine. Heather-
wick wanted it to conjure Britain’s rich array
of green spaces, and so he placed a different
kind of seed from the Kew Gardens Millen-
nium Seed Bank in each rod and called his
structure the Seed Cathedral.
Goldhagen tells us that she responded
in very different ways to the two pavilions.
Nouvel’s, she tells us, brought forth a wave
of anxiety. “An all-red environment shifts
the human pituitary gland into high gear,
raising blood pressure and pulse rate, in-
creasing muscular tension, and stimulating
sweat glands. Such a place can energize
and excite us, to be sure, but it’s the kind
of excitement that’s coupled with agitated
tension and can easily slip into anger and ag-
gression.” The Heatherwick design, on the
other hand, she found more soothing. “Each
individual rod also held a tiny light source,
so that at night, the feathery Seed Cathedral
displayed literally 60,000 points of light,
softly swaying in the wind.” The result, she
concluded, “inspired gentle delight.”
Others have contrasted buildings like this
in much the same manner, but what is note-
worthy here is that Goldhagen isn’t using
what she calls “embodied cognition”—the
standard, normal responses of most human
beings to particular environments—to argue
against radical designs and in favor of conven-
tional ones. Both Nouvel and Heatherwick
produced original and unusual structures,
and Goldhagen wants only to report on
which one is more comfortable to experience.
Most claims that humans respond naturally
to certain shapes have really been arguments
for traditional building, many of them in-
fluenced by the writings of the architectural
theorist Christopher Alexander, author of
A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of
Building. Goldhagen deftly tosses the whole
idea aside as “a pastiche of sociology and nos-
talgia”; she is not writing a screed in favor of
traditional building, but rather wants to help
us understand that comfort doesn’t always
correlate with what’s conventional.
This doesn’t mean that Goldhagen is
willing to let architects have their way with
the world. She comes down as hard as any-
one on Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind,
for example, much of whose work is known
for the same sharp angles and clashing lines
that provoked her ire with Nouvel’s pavilion.
She is unsparing when it comes to those
buildings that she believes cause discomfort
because of their neurological effects, stating:
“Humans respond to compositions domi-
nated by sharp, irregular, angled forms with
discomfort, even fear.” But she looks kindly
on the “lilting forms” of Frank Gehry’s Gug-
genheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a swoop-
ing, curving building that she describes as a
place in which “the human body’s presence
and movement in space [are] the animating
features in a design.” She sees, correctly, that
Gehry’s unusual forms are driven not by a
desire to shock, but by a wish to find new ways
to elicit a sense of pleasure.
Goldhagen puts much stock in surface—
more so than in shape, in fact—and praises
buildings that use a multiplicity of materials
and finishes to create a sense of richness and
texture. She analyzes with exquisite precision
the experience of walking through Louis
Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California,
explaining the sensuous nature of this great
building and its ability to be at once powerful
and deferential, receding before the magnifi-
cent vista of the Pacific Ocean.
Goldhagen’s extended discussion of the
Salk Institute is a reminder of how excellent
she is as an architecture critic. So is her analy-
sis of Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial
in Berlin, a vast warren of concrete blocks
that was conceived to demonstrate the awful-
ness that can come from a seemingly rational
structure carried to extremes, but that, as
Goldhagen brilliantly observes, now func-
tions more as a kind of entertaining maze, a
fun house more than a metaphor for horror.
But if the experience of sensual satisfac-
tion, of comfort, can sometimes come from
daring and unusual buildings, do ordinary
things at least guarantee us some degree
of comfort as well? In other words, is theplain suburban house OK—satisfying, if not
great and important? Here again, Goldhagen
makes clear that the priority she places on vi-
sual and psychological comfort should not be
confused with an acceptance of the everyday
or banal. She is impatient with developer-built
housing for all the obvious reasons: cheap
construction, poor and unsustainable materi-
als, bad room arrangements, social isolation.
“No heed is paid to prevailing winds
or to the trajectory of the sun’s rays,” she
tells us, arguing that the people in such
tract-house developments “lose out...on the
well- established psychic and social benefits
of being enmeshed in closer and looser net-
works of people.” To Goldhagen, the resi-
dents of these suburban communities have
only slightly more control over their envi-
ronment than do people in the slums of India
or on the subway platforms of New York—
two other kinds of places that Goldhagen
asserts leave their occupants miserable.
It is hard to argue with any of this, or with
the underlying premises for Goldhagen’s ar-
chitectural preferences. She believes, first and
foremost, that people need some connection
to nature, particularly in terms of natural
light, but also in terms of greenery and open
space. She also believes they need commu-
nity, a sense of accessibility, and visual variety
and stimulation, although not to the point
of confusion and chaos. People respond to
patterns and to a human scale; soft forms are
better than hard ones, refinement better than
crudity. Goldhagen dislikes buildings that
might be considered arbitrary or aggressive.
But none of these are hard-and-fast rules, and
creativity always overrides formulas.G
oldhagen pays relatively little attention
to space, the least concrete element
of architecture and, perhaps for this
reason, the one that many architectural
critics overemphasize. The physical
reality of buildings—what they feel like and
look like, how they are to touch, even the
sounds and smells they produce—are of more
interest to her than space alone, which I
suspect she finds, at least conceptually, a bit
of an indulgence, or at least a way for many
architects and critics to avoid engaging with
the physical things that Goldhagen builds her
arguments around.
In order to make her case, Goldhagen
invokes scientists like Irving Biederman, the
psychologist who came up with the concept
of geons: basic form-shapes, like cylinders,
wedges, bricks, and cones, that we can easily
identify and that help us understand more
complex objects. We recognize these forms
intuitively, Goldhagen tells us, in the same