Icon 101 is out now and we step into a new century with an issue on “Waste”. We look beyond our culture of planned obsolescence, at what happens to things after we throw them away – and find that some of them end up in a better place.

This month a major retrospective of work by the Bouroullec brothers opens at the Centre Pompidou in Metz; the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art dedicates a show to mid-century Californian modernism; Belgium’s z33 explores the architecture of fear, and Frieze Art Fair returns to Regent’s Park.

Artist Jeremy Hutchison explores the nature of mass production by getting factory workers from around the world to throw a spanner in the works.

London studio A Practice for Everyday Life steals candy (or at least its packaging) from babies and reclaims it as a sophisticated snack for adults.

To help celebrate our centenary, Icon challenged food design studio Blanch & Shock to stretch the boundaries of sponge-based sculpture…

Christo, the artist who gift-wrapped the Pont Neuf and Reichstag, has spent years battling for permission to realise his extravagant installations. He talks to Icon about his ongoing struggle to cover six miles of the Arkansas river in metallic material and to build a pyramid with 410,000 oil barrels in Abu Dhabi.

For Icon's 100th issue, we asked cover stars from the past eight years to send us their best wishes in a birthday card. Here's the whole collection, including cards by Peter Eisenman, Matali Crasset, Atelier Van Lieshout, Daniel Eatock, Ben van Berkel and more.

Power of Making, an exhibition dedicated to contemporary craft, opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum last week. Curator Daniel Charny shared five of his most favourite designs with Icon in our August issue.

We celebrate 100 issues of Icon with an exploding cake by Blanch & Shock and birthday cards from eight years of cover stars. Plus we go behind the scenes at OMA, who also designed our cover, explore the architecture of the London Olympics, pick the best of this year’s design graduates and interview legendary artist Christo.

A major retrospective of postmodernism opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo dedicates a show to 1960s metabolism; jewellery by Picasso, Max Ernst and others is displayed in New York, and the London Design Festival kicks off in various venues around the city.

The Italian design duo’s Botanica range of vases reinvents plastic as a craft material by using long-forgotten plant and animal polymers.

With only a week left to see The Vorticists at Tate Britain, we bring you Owen Hatherley’s review of this exhibition celebrating the “insurgent avant-garde” art movement that flourished in London before and during World War One.