Hal Foster’s book turns a spotlight on the gallery spaces "starchitects" such as Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano have become famous for designing. Kieran Long finds Foster's architectural commentary "less than agenda-setting", and wonders why the urban context of their architecture never gets a mention.

There’s lots to go and see this month: post-industrial design at the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition of toys at the Grand Palais, eccentric works by Wim Delvoye at the Museum of Old and New Art and the Serpentine Gallery’s retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, open from today.

Herzog & de Meuron’s landmark headquarters for a pharmaceutical company shows off the latest in structural technology.

Icon 103 is out now. For our Annual Report, Iwan Baan, the most celebrated architectural photographer of his generation, has selected his 12 best images of the year. The globetrotting photographer travelled 190,000 air miles to take these pictures. We present them as a calendar for 2012, one photograph for every month. Also, it has now been a year since Icon’s redesign.

Victor van der Chijs speaks about Prudence in the third of our exclusive previews of the Barbican’s OMA in Conversation series.

MAD has landed an abstract metallic object in the middle of the Inner Mongolian desert, hoping to shape the barren region’s cultural identity.

In Vardø, an island at the most northeasterly point of Norway, Pritzker prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois collaborated on a monument to 91 witches burned at the stake in the 17th century.

Mieke Meijer and Dutch firm Vij5 have invented a process to make wood out of paper and invited other designers to test out the new material.

Here is the second in our series of exclusive previews of the OMA in Conversation series, featuring Rem Koolhaas, the co-founder of OMA speaking about Progress.

Unless you’re the proud owner of “BIG DAV 1”, the code on the front of your car doesn’t tell the world much about you or your vehicle. Paris-based studio Artworklove has a plan to change that.

The Turner-prize nominated sculptor is inspired by classic pieces of modernist furniture and reinterprets them to make "places, not things".

Icon 102 is out now and the theme of the new issue is “Fire”. We interview Peter Zumthor, who recently completed a memorial to 91 witches who were burned at the stake in the 17th century on the Arctic island of Vardø, Norway, in collaboration with Louise Bourgeois.