Icon Magazine July 2015 Back Issue

Our new issue (out on 4 June) celebrates the arrival of summer, with FAT and Grayson Perry’s House for Essex, Ooze Architects’ King’s Cross swimming pond, the surprising modernist history of Center Parcs and Bruno Drummond’s Cedric Price-inspired photo essay
When friends tell me that they are considering a stay at Center Parcs, or social media presents me with post-facto evidence of the event, I suppress a guilty shudder. There is something unseemly about writers scrambling to claim some malaise as peculiar to their era, but perhaps we can be forgiven for suggesting that attitudes to leisure have changed in the digital age.
We’re increasingly aware of the infinite variety of available activities, of our inevitable failure to pursue even a minor fraction, and of our own insidious judgmentalism about how others spend their spare time. Yet, in the hands of talented practitioners, projects associated with leisure can still bring real joy, and sometimes even enlightenment.
Ooze Architects, with a natural bathing pool at King’s Cross; Snøhetta, with its vertical playground near Innsbruck; Herzog & de Meuron, with a stadium for FC Girondins in Bordeaux, have all pushed at the edges of typologies to maximise their potential – and, in the case of the King’s Cross pool, may even be pointing towards a possible solution to one pressing urban predicament.