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Icon’s latest issue, available from 2 August, features an essay on the future of the countryside by Rem Koolhaas, as well as articles about digital farming, slaughterhouses and Wolfgang Buttress. Scroll down to see the contents and click through to read the articles online This issue was inspired by an article suggested by Rem Koolhaas, in which he argues that the countryside has been overlooked by architects. It is a digital frontier, increasingly mediated by technology, that is in the process of volatile transformation that exceeds that of the most accelerated city. And it is irresponsible, he writes here, for architects to focus their attention so exclusively on cities, without looking at the evacuated spaces that define them. How do we feed the world’s 7 billion people, over half of which already live in urban areas? Despite our pastoral fantasies, farming has become a massive industry, the landscape a huge factory, as we squeeze the earth’s limited resources in an attempt to do so. This brings with it all the ecological threats that we too easily ignore for the sake of cheapness and convenience. These, as we know, are global problems: GM soy is grown in the Amazonian rainforest and fed to European cattle; Peruvian sardines fatten British pigs and Scottish farmed salmon. In a recent book, Philip Lymbery argues that, in the quest for cheap food, and because we eat too much of it, we’re heading for Farmageddon. We look at other aspects of the contemporary agro-industry that increasingly alienates farmers, and the rest of us, from the land. Daisy Ginsberg visits agricultural Iowa, where squadrons of combine harvesters are controlled by satellite and the prairies watered by drones. And we look behind the blank industrial sheds of the architecture of slaughter, the ruthlessly efficient assembly line through which almost all of of our meat passes. Read more about Icon here and subscribe to the magazine here |
Words Christopher Turner
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IN THIS ISSUE Rem Koolhaas OMA’s founder argues that the countryside is a digital frontier that is changing faster than any city Slaughterhouses The assembly-line logic of the abbatoir runs through modern architecture Digital farming Smart combine-harvesters and drones are revolutionising industrial farming Wolfgang Buttress The artist is taking a virtual beehive and a slice of the British countryside to the World Expo next year PLUS A round-up of this year’s Design Parade, a Bauhaus master’s house restored, a Swiss school by Angela Deuber, vases by Studio Markunpoika, furniture by Office KGDVS and Lex Pott’s collection made from a single tree Reviews Digital revolution at the Barbican, a town planner’s tour of Britain, Soviet design classics, and a new book by Henri Lefebvre Icon of the month The Metropolitan Green Belt Anatomy of Seaboard Grand Rethink Human pictogram Five most wanted Zeev Aram Sketchbook Piet Oudolf |
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