Zaha Hadid Architects has completed a sinuous, fluid office building in the south of France which attempts to alter our expectations of towers.

Fireworks and a new sculpture park give the Gulf’s richest country a chance to put on a display of culture in its capital.

This London duo’s fixation with the art of creation is challenging the notion that product designers should focus on the end result.

Bernard Tschumi’s interpretation centre in Burgundy on the site of a legendary Roman siege is invisible from the town above.

Thomas Heatherwick will be hosting an evening talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday 11 May and 100 tickets have been reserved exclusively for Icon readers.

Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic dot installations go on show at the Tate, New York’s MAD Museum looks at artists who work with dirt, Design Indaba kicks off in Cape Town, London’s Design Museum showcases its Designs of the Year and Inga Sempé is Guest of Honour at Stockholm Furniture Fair.

Icon 105 is devoted to “Ruins”. For this month’s cover story we visit the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine, where in 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded sending clouds of radiation over northern Europe, and the nearby town of Pripyat which is one of the hardest ruins to gain access to.

In this, the fifth in our series of exclusive previews of the OMA in Conversation series, Ellen van Loon speaks about the new Rothschild Bank headquarters, OMA's first completed building in London.

Iwan Baan is a global nomad, restlessly travelling the world documenting new projects by the world’s most distinguished architects. Last year, he clocked up 190,000 air miles shooting projects by Herzog & de Meuron, OMA and Steven Holl, among others. Here are the stories behind Baan’s best shots of 2011.

OMA’s architectural faculty building at Cornell is a playful take on modernism, with a clever hybrid structure that doubles as a teaching aid.

David Adjaye’s seven-volume taxonomy of African cities covers settlements in forests, mountains, grasslands and deserts. But is this huge collection of the architect’s photographs guilty of overlooking the problems of mass urbanisation on this understudied continent?

French designer Sibylle Delclaux has stripped down high-tech electronics to their basic elements to create an elegant, functional and intuitive range of products that has educational as well as practical value.