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This year, Icon readers leapt upon articles featuring big names such as Bjarke Ingels, Rem Koolhaas and Peter Zumthor, as well as those about the emerging designers in our graduates round-up. Here are 10 stories that did particular well. Edwin Heathcote’s views on Paul Cummins’ installation at the Tower of London for Remembrance Day got Icon readers sharing and talking.
For our Countryside issue, Will Wiles examined the architecture of slaughterhouses, arguing that assembly lines of suspended carcasses played a fundamental role in the grisly birth of modern architecture.
Our selection of this year’s outstanding young designers found inspiration in everything from Mexican folk tales to plastic shopping bags.
7. Icon Awards 2014: The winners This year’s awards ceremony took place on 4 December. The full list of winner was published online the day after the event and profiles of all of them are in our current issue.
In August, we met a rising star of Iceland’s emerging design scene to discuss her country’s traditional industries and its storytelling culture, and how these influence her work.
5. Rethinking Old Street roundabout For Clerkenwell Design Week this year, Icon asked six local architects to redesign the east London eyesore. Ideas included a social and professional melting pot, a pop-up folly and allowing nature to prevail and transform the roundabout into a tangled bank.
Our upcoming issue features BIG’s proposals for a human zoo. Earlier this year, we wrote about the practice’s Danish Maritime Museum and the legal wrangles that it went through before completing this “invisible icon”.
3. East London’s international redesign Plans to free up under-occupied homes, bring the spontaneity of Lagos to London and make better used of the capital’s canals were among the proposals to improve east London that emerged after the British Council invited practices from around the world to work with British firms.
It have been a construction site, but Peter Zumthor’s Zinc Mine Museum and Icon’s meeting with the man himself in his village in the Alps, which featured in our Underground issue, caught the attention of Icon readers. Twelve years in the making, the project continues to edge towards completion.
1. Rem Koolhaas in the country The OMA founder’s illustrated essay for Icon’s Countryside issue was by far the most popular story of 2014. In it, Koolhaas – whose firm won the 2014 Icon Award for Architecture Practice of the Year – argued that architects should temper their obsession with cities and turn attention to the countryside, which he says is the frontline of transformation. |
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