The Icon team are taking a break over the festive period but we'll be back in 2012 to bring you more of the very best in international design, architecture and culture. Happy holidays!

Preston Scott Cohen’s elegant extension to the Israeli city’s museum of art has a modest facade that veils a complex and dramatic interior.

The dingy packages, parcels and envelopes of the Royal Mail get a makeover, to make the experience of visiting a post office almost as exciting as receiving a letter – even if the actual post office remains the same.

In this, the fourth in our series of exclusive previews of the OMA in Conversation series, Reinier de Graaf, speaks about the difficulties of building in London.

From land mines to financial crises, this year’s batch of graduates has taken a step away from the conceptual to tackle real-life problems.

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s church in Hainburg, Austria combines digital design with references to the giants of modernism.

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.