ICON 053 | November 2007 | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE

ICON 053 | November 2007

	Julia Lohmann Feature Julia Lohmann spends a lot of time at the butcher's. If Lohmann were an artist, critics and theorists would be piling up readings of her work, probing for fetishism and ritual, mining a visceral conceptualism.

	Christopher Kane Feature Christopher Kane is just two years out of fashion college and already he has turned down a job at Versace, been round to American Vogue editor Anna Wintour's for tea, refused to dress Victoria Beckham, created a Topshop line that sold out in 24 hours and made fashion critic Hilary Alexander cry with joy.

	London Design Festival Feature This year, the London Design Festival felt like a festival. The event gets bigger every year, but this time there was a sense that people were starting to work together rather than just setting out their own stalls.

	Kolumba Museum Feature The Kolumba Museum was the perfect commission for Peter Zumthor - maybe too perfect. The cocktail of complex history, of the existential angst of creating an art museum above a church flattened by bombs, of interlocking architectural layers, seemed ideal.

	Icon of the Month: Tron Icon of the month It was announced in September that director Joseph Kosinski is to remake the much-loved 1982 Disney film Tron. On the surface, Tron is ideal fodder for a remake.

	Guest Editor: Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher Guest Editor The authoritarian episodes of the 20th century have made people wary of utopian projects, and so urban experiments are confined to theory. But the real experiment will come when we try some of these ideas for real. In our utopia, things are layered and complex, but elegant and playful...

	Essay: Architecture on TV Essay Choked by the perceived limitations of the medium, depictions of architecture on television today offer little more than domestic narrative and personality branding. But two programmes from the 1970s show us what you can do with a bit of originality and some community action.

	London Fashion Week Feature London Fashion Week created some justifiable excitement this season. The events were swimming in money and big names, who had come to see fashion's young stars: Giles Deacon, Marios Schwab, Jonathan Saunders and Christopher Kane.

	Marks Barfield Gallery Overlapping scales in five shades of silver and gold make up the facade of The Lightbox, a museum and gallery designed by Marks Barfield Architects.

	Helsinki Gallery Craft and nature continue to be prevalent themes for many young Finnish designers, and Helsinki Design Week showed that the shadows of Alvar Aalto, Kaj Franck and other greats still loom large.

	Design Academy Eindhoven Gallery Discretion was the prevailing attitude of this year’s Design Academy Eindhoven graduates, contrasting greatly with the "big" design landscape that was mapped out at the Milan furniture fair this year.

	Tabourets Gallery Tabourets, the French word for stools, is an exhibition at Galerie Kreo in Paris for which 23 designers have produced one-off works. Contributors include Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison, Hella Jongerius, Andrea Branzi, Fernando Brizio and Julia Lohmann.

	Review: Al Manakh Review I almost reviewed this book a few months ago. I picked up a copy at the launch in Dubai but was so glutted with my experience of the place that I didn't feel like I could handle anymore weird images or staggering statistics. It has sat on my desk all that time, intriguing but also irking me.

	Review: The Goldfinger Project Review One of the most famous stories about the clash between architecture and popular culture is the grudge held by James Bond author Ian Fleming against his neighbour, Ernö Goldfinger.

	Review: Design: Intelligence Made Visible Review This tome says more about its authors than its subject, and they're behind the times. "Certainties about standards of taste... [have] in recent times disappeared altogether," write the authors of Design: Intelligence Made Visible, an A-Z of design.

	Review: Cigarette Health Warnings Review All governments rely on fear to some extent. Most people don't pay their taxes out of gratitude for the services and security they receive in return - they pay because they fear the consequences of non-payment.

	Review: New Practices London Review New Practices London, on show at the AIA New York Chapter's Center for Architecture, is billed as "the future of the architecture profession in London".

	A wooden cube A wooden cube ends a row of terraces in De Beauvoir Town, north London. Recently completed by David Adjaye, the house was designed for a photographer friend, Ed Reeve.

	High density Lego “A pixellated blob” is how Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) sees its Lego model for a housing project in Copenhagen, on show at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture until the end of November.

	Daniel Libeskind Daniel Libeskind has designed a structure to cover the courtyard of the original 18th-century Jewish Museum adjacent to his 1999 extension in Berlin. The Glass Courtyard, which opened in September, is a 12m-high, freestanding steel structure with a glazed roof and curtain walls.

	Happy Pills Happy Pills is a sweet shop on a narrow plot in central Barcelona, designed by Spanish practice M. The shop, a tongue-in-cheek homage to traditional pharmacies, was designed to appeal specifically to adults in a busy shopping and tourist area with few school children.

	Ábalos & Herreros Ábalos & Herreros has designed a three-storey house with a deliberately ambiguous facade, on a small plot of land just north of Madrid.

	A grassy knoll A grassy knoll has transformed an under-used public space behind the Economist headquarters on St James Street, central London. Called Convocation, the project is an installation by London-based art and design practice Sparks.