Modernist master Álvaro Siza’s rather sober winery building in Portugal is a refreshing contrast to its more raucous peers.

The latest creation by experimental Japanese firm Suppose Design Office is part home, part garden, but neither is quite complete.

For our mobile phones special, novelist Will Self muses on signals - are teenagers who use phones to navigate the city and co-ordinate liaisons like bats who find each other in the dark using echolocation? For more on the meaning of the mobile phone, pick up a copy of Icon 106.

Pei Zhu, one of China’s most prominent architects, has landed a new intergalactic museum on the waterfront in Shenzhen.

The designers at Toormix are big fans of their local tipple, but worry that it suffers from a lack of coherent branding. Here’s their solution.

100% Design has announced the launch of 100% Future Living, a showcase of the best in design, technology and innovation. 100% Future Living will be the theme connecting each of the four new show sections: Interiors, Eco Design & Build, Kitchens & Bathrooms and Office. To read more click here

Tokyo architect Sou Fujimoto’s latest experiment in compact living is a minimalist climbing tower of glass walls and super-thin steel floor plates.

Artist Mary Ellen Carroll worked with British studio Simon Dance Design and a mathematician to create a set of furniture that lets you manipulate conversation.

The V&A opens a major exhibition on British design in the postwar years, Budapest hosts a four-day architecture film festival, SFMOMA surveys Buckminster Fuller’s influence in the Bay Area, John Pawson’s exhibition travels to the Pinakothek der Moderne and Pick Me Up, the graphic art fair, gets underway at Somerset House.

Over 22 pages of this special issue of Icon, we bring together designers, writers and experts to consider the meaning of the world’s most important object, the mobile phone.