Pairs is a student-led journal at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) dedicated to conversations about design. Each annual issue is conceptualized by an editorial team that proposes guests and objects to be in dialogue with one another. Pairs is non-thematic, meant instead for provisional thoughts and ideas in progress. Each issue seeks to organize diverse threads and concerns that are perceived to be relevant to our moment. Thus, Pairs creates a space for understanding and a greater degree of exchange, both between the design disciplines and with a larger public.

Pairs 03 features conversations with Thomas Demand, Mindy Seu, Mira Henry and Matthew Au, Alfredo Thiermann, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Anne Lacaton, Edward Eigen, Katarina Burin, Marrikka Trotter, Christopher C. M. Lee, Keller Easterling, and others. Contributors include the editors and Elif Erez, Emily Hsee, Stephanie Lloyd, Andrea Sandell, Kenismael Santiago-Págan, Klelia Siska, and Julia Spackman.

The Pantheon in Rome is one of the grand architectural statements of all ages. This richly illustrated book isolates the reasons for its extraordinary impact on Western architecture, discussing the Pantheon as a building in its time but also as a building for all time.

Mr. MacDonald traces the history of the structure since its completion and examines its progeny--domed rotundas with temple-fronted porches built from the second century to the twentieth--relating them to the original. He analyzes the Pantheon's design and the details of its technology and construction, and explores the meaning of the building on the basis of ancient texts, formal symbolism, and architectural analogy. He sees the immense unobstructed interior, with its disk of light that marks the sun's passage through the day, as an architectural metaphor for the ecumenical pretensions of the Roman Empire.

Past discussions of the Pantheon have tended to center on design and structure. These are but the starting point for Mr. MacDonald, who goes on to show why it ranks--along with Cheops's pyramid, the Parthenon, Wren's churches, Mansard's palaces-as an architectural archetype.

Who says you can’t be pious and fashionable? Throughout the Muslim world, women have found creative ways of expressing their personality through the way they dress. Headscarves can be modest or bold, while brand-name clothing and accessories are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry that caters to pious fashion from head to toe. In this lively snapshot, Liz Bucar takes us to Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia and finds a dynamic world of fashion, faith, and style.

“Brings out both the sensuality and pleasure of sartorial experimentation.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“I defy anyone not to be beguiled by [Bucar’s] generous-hearted yet penetrating observation of pious fashion in Indonesia, Turkey and Iran… Bucar uses interviews with consumers, designers, retailers and journalists…to examine the presumptions that modest dressing can’t be fashionable, and fashion can’t be faithful.”
—Times Higher Education

“Bucar disabuses readers of any preconceived ideas that women who adhere to an aesthetic of modesty are unfashionable or frumpy.”
—Robin Givhan, Washington Post

“A smart, eye-opening guide to the creative sartorial practices of young Muslim women… Bucar’s lively narrative illuminates fashion choices, moral aspirations, and social struggles that will unsettle those who prefer to stereotype than inform themselves about women’s everyday lives in the fast-changing, diverse societies that constitute the Muslim world.”
—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Inspiration, happy accidents, and outright obsessions have all had their way with gardens—but nothing has done more to shape the modern garden than plants themselves. In a story that ranges from continent to continent and spans four centuries, botanist and gardener David Stuart reveals how the garden as we know it was created not by garden designers but by ordinary gardeners responding to exotic and novel plants that suggested new spaces, places, and means of display. The history begins with two earth-changing events—the establishment of colonies in the Americas and the spread of the Turkish empire. Both brought the first astonishing wave of flowering exotics to gardens across Europe. Stuart relates how, over the following centuries, the influx of new plants inspired a frenzy of hybridization (at first by a new breed of gardener, the “florist,” later by nurserymen), which in turn led to such features as the familiar herbaceous border, flower bed, and rose garden, as well as the now little-known rockery, shrubbery, and “wilderness.”

From the Dutch tulip mania, the eighteenth-century European passion for “American gardens,” and on to the rhododendron craze of the nineteenth century, Stuart’s book traces the shape of the modern garden as it changed with the fashion, returning at last to classic, cottage garden varieties long neglected in favor of the foreign and new. In conclusion, Stuart looks at plant prospecting today—now that the collecting of plants may prove essential to protecting botanical diversity and preserving plant species rapidly disappearing from the wild.

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.