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

Architecture critic Goldhagen (Anxious Modernisms) makes a passionate, persuasive plea for better design—a built environment that places humans before the “short-term or parochial interests” that typically drive construction and renovation of human habitats. This generously illustrated volume takes readers on a tour of the built environments in which most of us live, work, and play, using concrete examples in each chapter to anchor the author’s arguments. The first two chapters describe the status quo and introduce the concept of “blindsight,” a cognitive condition the author employs as a metaphor to explore the complex role built environment plays in an individual’s experience and internal world. She also discusses the human need for nature and the ways that social environments shape and are shaped by spatial design, and concludes with suggestions for design that supports, rather than works against, human thriving. The author has an educator’s conviction that bad design is grounded in ignorance, and that if “people understand just how much design matters, they’d care... they’d change.” Yet much of our built environment is the result of policy and investment decisions that remain opaque to the average resident of a city apartment complex, visitor to a public park, or employee in an office building. Because of this, more examples of grassroots organizing for change would have strengthened the work’s final chapters; readers will be justified in wondering whence the political and economic will to change might spring. Color photos. [em](Apr.) [/em]