Jaime Gillin

With nearly half a century of in-the-field experience, Pakistan’s first female architect leads an ambitious nonprofit, the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan.

As profiled in our "Women of Influence" roundup in our July/August 2012 issue, Yasmeen Lari is the closest thing Pakistan has to a design superhero. After years working as an architect, designing buildings for a wide range of clients, from corporate campuses to low-income housing, she left private practice in order to focus on issues close to her heart, including developing sustainable and vernacular disaster relief housing and dedicating herself to writing, research, and her work with the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, the ambitious nonprofit she developed with her husband. Here, we ask her  questions about her architectural work, her philanthropical passions, and the unique challenges of working in her homeland.

In recent years, the Danish furniture company Fritz Hansen has taken aggressive measures to protect their products against knockoffs and counterfeits across the globe. They have rounded up and destroyed numerous counterfeit Series 7 chairs (labeled incorrectly and illegally as Fritz Hansen products), identifying the pieces as fakes by their shoddy quality and lack of official identification (since 2006, all authentic Fritz Hansen products have a unique serial number and a tag with an invisible thread in it to validate its authenticity). They’ve also campaigned on the internet, releasing viral videos that show company employees stomping on fake Series 7 chairs (spoiler alert, they break) and then stomping on a real one (which bouncily absorbs the employee’s weight). Though their classic designs are thoroughly protected in Europe under Registered Community Design laws, they are not safeguarded in the U.S., where intellectual property protections are weaker and expire more quickly. Some, of course, see this as a good thing, as they return classic designs to the public realm for free and unrestrained reinterpretation by a new generation of designers—but that also opens things up to copycats.

Judging by all the great feedback we've received on Kathryn Tyler's lovely Falmouth, England, home (Collector's Choice, June 2012), you all loved her style—and awesome collections of vintage furniture and cookware—as much as we did. Tyler founded her interior design studio, Linea Studio, in 2004. Based in Cornwall, she is currently at work on a diverse array of projects, from a bar in Edinburgh to a new coffee shop in South Africa to a windmill in the Netherlands that she's converting into a recording studio. Here's a peek at some other projects she's recently finished.