Goldhagen to Deliver Architecture Lecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Sarah Goldhagen, author of an influential and myth-busting book on Louis Kahn, one of the most important architects to emerge in the decades after World War II, will present the final talk in the 2003-04 Lecture Series of the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.

The lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. on April 14 in Crosby Hall on the UB South (Main Street) Campus. It will be free and open to the public. A public reception will follow the talk.

The scholarship by Goldhagen, a critic of contemporary architecture and urbanism for The American Prospect, reflects the insight she draws from cultural theory and history, philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.

Her book, "Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism" (Yale University Press, 2001), casts a new light on the work of the "architect of light," a man whose elegant buildings of cast concrete moved the International Style beyond corporate modernism toward a more eloquent and spiritual direction. Architectural historian Francesco Passanti has said Goldhagen's book "will durably change the paradigm by which we have viewed Louis Kahn now for several decades."

Goldhagen is a lecturer in the Harvard Design School, where she specializes in the theorization and history of modernism. She is interested particularly in the complex and varied courses taken by modernism after it was initially -- and, she would say, artificially -- codified in the 1920s, and proposes the reconceptualization of "style" in the scholarly discussion of modernism.

Goldhagen is the co-editor, with Réjean Legault of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, of "Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture" (MIT, 2001), a collection of essays by 13 authors based, in part, on a 1998 international conference, "Reconceptualizing the Modern: Architectural Culture, 1944-1968," which she and Legault organized.

A popular lecturer, she is published widely and currently at work on several projects, among them two books, "Rethinking Modernism (in Architecture)" and "Monumental Modernism: The Postwar Challenge," and a series of essays on the architecture of H.H. Richardson and Pritzker Prize-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.