Because it's more than a flight of fancy. Paris-based lighting designer Matheiu Challieres has created a series of strange aviaries, beautiful, copper-wire lamps housing delicate birds of every colour. These frozen menageries seem to await the fairy dust that will bring them to life and let them flutter free from their birdcage. Challieres avoids the mumsy pastiche of putting birds on a chandelier by turning the cage into the chandelier. Warming and delicate, the fantastic whimsy of these pieces lures us out of the safety of modernism into a brave new world where illusion is king and rooms are transformed by avian mirages. What a dream to be a bird! La Voliere Shade

Because this tome stands amidst the architectural icons of today. Designed by the Tank team, the towering volume "is a cross-section of the thinking and ideas that are currently prevalent at Harvard Graduate School of Design" under Dean and archi-pundit Mohsen Mostafavi. But more than that, it's an experiment in book design. With its postmodern façade - a cover is replaced by the delicate contents page; this book's inside is on the outside: all the structural details are fully on display. Take a leisurely wander through the "surprising and productive juxtapositions" of the interior "which will provide the basis for new forms of transdisciplinary practice in the years ahead". This is a page-by-page account of the cutting edge projects by the students and illustrious lecturers at Harvard who are designing tomorrow's cities. If you're in the market for a thinker's coffee table book on architecture, this is hot property