How are our fears shaped through architecture? Can we think our way out of fear? Design our way through dread? We fill fight or flight. Are we duck? Harvard Design Magazine's newest issue, the 42nd edition explores the relationship between architecture and fear. The magazine's Summer/Spring issue 'Run for Cover' investigates the architectural discourse as a 'weapon', 'target', or 'motivator for progress', which is not running away from our fears-actually is not seeing architecture as 'shelter'.

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine explores how fear—of assault, of nature, of power, of the Other—shapes our physical world, and how the built environment provokes, prevents, or palliates fear. As the makers and inhabitants of this militarized “age of terror,” we reach for our “shields” automatically, often avoiding the deeper sources of fear. 

“Run for Cover!” suggests that maybe designers need to unlearn the shelter reflex. Fear can be a motivator for progress—not for walling in or walling out, but for imagining, configuring, and instrumentalizing spaces that foster coexistence, cooperation, and trust.

But what shields or defends can intimidate, exclude, and punish. Architecture is not just refuge, but target and weapon; buildings entrap, collapse, explode, segregate.

In this issue; there are stimulating writings by Geoff Manaugh, Jennifer Sigler, Interboro Partners, Blair Kamin, and Oliver Wainwright—among many others. You can read select articles online now, or buy the whole thing for € 18.00.

Relaunched in summer 2014, Harvard Design Magazine probes beyond the established design disciplines to enrich and diversify current discourse. Scholarly, poetic, and visually lush, each issue triggers new interpretations of design’s defining role in today’s culture. Distinguished and unexpected voices from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning meet those from the realms of art, science, literature, and beyond. A space for dialogue, speculation, and surprise: Harvard Design Magazine opens a door onto the applied device of design, and the people, places, and politics it engages.

Top image: Harvard Design Magazine

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