For our debut quarterly issue, with even more pages and in-depth perspectives, Icon investigates the forces shaping the countryside. In a new Focus section, Edwin Heathcote delves into the unsung technologies and movements shaping the rural world, while Katy Kelleher investigates permaculture - a sustainable form of farming that respects the landscape and existing habitats. Phineas Harper explores the fraying edges between the city and the country and Prix Pictet nominee Rena Effendi points her lens at the fast-changing traditions of life in rural Transylvania. Our regular design and architecture sections are, as always, dedicated to the most urgent topics facing design and architecture: from the intimate history of New York’s gay saunas, which gave rise to Manhattan’s Loft Movement in the 1970s and 80s, to designers eschewing novelty in favour of slow evolution based on object typologies. Icon editor Priya Khanchandani interviews Beatriz Colomina about the relationship between architecture, health and work, while our reviewers examine two new cultural buildings, in Istanbul and Groningen.