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.

In Icon’s ruins issue (Icon 105, March 2012), we accompany the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division on a trip to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Animator and filmmaker Jonathan Gales was also on the trip, and made this short film with his studio Factory Fifteen from footage shot in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Solitary, decaying and useless, London’s favourite derelict building stands proud and aloof amid legal wranglings, property speculation and the soulless transformation of its surroundings. For the “Ruins” issue, we made Battersea Power Station our Icon of the Month.

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.

French designers Thibault Zimmerman and Lucie Thomas (Zim & Zou) made Icon a neon-coloured paper hamburger for issue 104: The Future of Food. We had to settle on just one shot for the cover, but you can see more photos of their incredible paper-craft creation by clicking here.

The February issue of Icon is devoted to ‘Food’. We look at the overlooked world of food design – why are there Alessi jugs and Starck lemon squeezers in MoMA’s design collection, but no Kinder Surprise eggs? – and at the architects and designers who ask important questions about why industrially produced food looks the way it does.

January marks a bright start to the year in design and architecture. Icon look forward to the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Biennale, Jerszy Seymour at the Vitra Design Museum, IMM Cologne and Maison & Objet, a display of artists’ zines at London’s ICA and a conceptual exhibition on recycling at MAXXI in Rome.

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!

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.

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.

Icon 102 is out now and the theme of the new issue is “Fire”. We interview Peter Zumthor, who recently completed a memorial to 91 witches who were burned at the stake in the 17th century on the Arctic island of Vardø, Norway, in collaboration with Louise Bourgeois.

Bubble wrap, teabags, pencils and corkscrews are among the quotidian subject matter of Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things, which opens at the Science Museum in London today. Icon reviewed the show in issue 089, after its first showing at the Vitra Design Museum.

This month the Pavilion of Art and Design arrives in New York, the Canadian Centre for Architecture looks at the relationship between health and building design, World Architecture Festival gets underway in Barcelona and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen show alternative sustainable designs by Dunne & Raby, Joris Laarman and Philippe Rahm.

Icon is the media partner of the OMA/Progress exhibition currently showing at the Barbican, and we are releasing exclusive previews of the OMA in Conversation series. This is a unique chance to see individual OMA partners in conversation. The series begins with David Gianotten of OMA Asia and David Tseng talking about building in their part of the world.

Icon was particularly noticeable at this year’s London Design Festival which coincided with the publication of our 100th issue. To celebrate our centenary we held a party during this major event in the design calendar

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.