Icon is ten years old this month! For this special “collectors” issue, we asked Paul Smith, Richard Rogers, Amanda Levete, Sebastian Bergne, Madelon Vriesendorp, Peter Marigold and David Rockwell to show us their private collections of objects that influence their work. And we also invited all our past cover stars, from Maarten Baas to Daniel Libeskind, to complete the Icon psychological test.

This month Clerkenwell Design Week returns to London’s design district for its fourth edition. There are also exhibitions devoted to Charles Correa in London, James Turrell in Los Angeles and George Elmslie in Minneapolis, and in New York there’s Edward Hopper's drawings, the ICFF and the Frieze Art Fair – plus a celebration of activist design in Amsterdam. 

The Salone del Mobile is much more than an annual furniture tradeshow. Entire districts of the city come to life with installations and exhibitions that seem to be as much about art as design. In this issue we look at artists who have ventured into both architecture and furniture design, including Donald Judd, Jorge Pardo, Rachel Whiteread and Joep van Lieshout.

This month’s highlights include Le Corbusier in Sweden, a new life for the old Arsenal stadium, urban art in Paris, the Milan Furniture Fair, Los Angeles as a laboratory for the future, Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht and early works by Claes Oldenburg at MoMA.

Affordable 3D printers are bringing fantasies of home production closer to fulfilment, but the objects produced on them so far have been of relatively poor quality. In this issue, however, we look into the future at the possibilities rapid prototyping might offer – from cities that replicate themselves, to the “biologically inspired” designs our cover star Neri Oxman is creating at MIT.

This month David Bowie comes to the V&A and London’s Design Museum displays its designs of the year. There’s also a history of the line in art at the Pompidou-Metz, SCI-Arc’s look back at 1979, an urban advice bureau, contemporary designers working with wood, new towns in theory and in practice, and a survey of young Chinese artists. 

In this issue Icon talks to Adrian Smith, chief architect of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Smith has been designing skyscrapers for 44 years and is working on an even taller tower in Saudi Arabia. Winy Maas of MVRDV tells us about his pixel towers project, and we take in the view from Renzo Piano’s Shard in London. Plus: the latest Scandinavian designs in this month’s design report.

This month, SFMoMA remembers the great Lebbeus Woods, an arousing exhibition on sex and design opens in Milan, a show of Junya Ishigami's miniature models moves to Antwerp, the Barbican hosts a season on the cultural influence of Duchamp and two major design events kick off in Cape Town and Stockholm.   

It has long been a byword for a lavish welcome but from ancient Greece to modern Hollywood the red carpet has also had a habit of tripping up our heroes.

Icon 116 is devoted to Japan. Nearly two years after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the north of the country in March 2011, we revisit the disaster areas where architects and designers, including Toyo Ito’s KISYN group, are now helping to rebuild local communities. On the cover is Kengo Kuma, the master of “deceptive minimalism”, and we also talk to rising stars Takram Design Engineering.

The Dublin-based duo excel in designs that resonate with their cultural and historic contexts. They created one of the outstanding buildings of 2012 – Belfast’s Lyric Theatre – and are now testing their approach on major projects in London and Budapest.

San Rocco may be a magazine rather than an architect, but its spirit of intellectual enquiry and diverse crowd-sourced content has quickly established it as an influential voice in European architecture, as well as a compelling model for a new type of practice.

Jim Archer has designed a system that gets rid of waste, saves on fuel and provides a facility where communities in Kenya can come together and cook. Not a bad outcome after much time spent rooting through piles of rubbish.

Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin of Formafantasma specialise in challenging conventional ways of thinking about traditional materials such as leather and charcoal – and despite their collaborations with big-name manufacturers, they show no sign of losing their edge.

Frank Gehry’s New York theatre complex is a return to the raw plywood, concrete and glass architecture of his early career. He spoke to Icon about his design process, why he wants to be known for creating buildings of warmth and humanity, and why so much architecture achieves precisely the opposite.

It may not look much, but connect it to a keyboard and monitor and the Raspberry Pi becomes a desktop PC. With half a million units sold in its first year, its makers hope that this programmable computer will inspire a generation of children raised on games consoles to rediscover the delights of tinkering with code.

Konstantin Grcic’s wooden chair has an angular and awkward charm that springs from the responsiveness and hands-on approach of Italian furniture manufacturer Mattiazzi and the designer’s desire to rediscover his cabinet-making roots.

The sight of 204 copper torches rising to form one vast bowl of flame was an extraordinary finale to the London 2012 opening ceremony. It was also one of the highlights of an extraordinary 12 months for designer Thomas Heatherwick – who is also the winner of Icon of the year, an award decided by public vote.

Many cultural buildings are created with a civic purpose, but few achieve it as successfully as Jo Noero’s gallery complex in a South African township: a multi-purpose building that brings to life the enduring legacy of the apartheid struggle and provides a focal point for the community.

Few designers get to watch their work being ceremonially paraded up and down the country, but that’s how Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby spent the summer of 2012. The question is, after the “whirlwind” of the Olympic torch, what will they do next?