Every year since the beginning of the new century, the Serpentine Gallery in London has commissioned a summer pavilion from a famous architect. This summer, a new book Ten Years Serpentine Gallery Pavilions was published by Taschen Verlag to coincide with the opening of the eleventh annual pavilion, designed by Peter Zumthor. Helen Mallinson reviews Zumthor's pavilion here, in the context of the decade-old pavilion programme.

Four of the papers collected in this issue of arq were first presented at a conference called Field/Work, held in November 2009 and jointly organised by the University of Edinburgh and AHRA, the Architectural Humanities Research Association. Here, the Conference Chair reflects on the event, reviewing the ideas behind it and its outcomes.

Houses are fascinating because they seem to occupy a pivotal position in the spectrum of human construction. They are, perhaps, located right on the watershed between what is generally understood as ‘architecture’ and what is considered as just ‘building’. They allow us to probe the very definition of what architecture is perceived to be. Using the typology of the dwelling - and three examples from three architectural practices - we examine differing responses to context, climate and the vernacular, documenting and evaluating commonalities and differentials in design approaches. The examples are a holiday home in Dungeness by NORD, an artists’ residence and studio on Loch Fyne by GMA and a house on the Isle of Lewis by studioKAP.

A green Unimog, the penultimate agricultural utility vehicle, makes its way through a curved, potholed road in the dark woods of Lower Bavaria. What differs from an otherwise everyday scene is the strange, compact structure that rises from its rear body and partly overhangs the driver's cabin. Painted in a warm yellow and oxblood red it contrasts vividly with the muted dark green of the surrounding fir trees.

At the end of the road, the forest opens up and the wide plain of the river Inn leads the way towards the west, towards Munich. Looking southwards through the driver's window one can see the profile of the Bavarian Alps in the evening sunset. Arriving in Munich the vehicle makes a stop at a busy boulevard lined with cafés and bars.

In our daily life we draw heavily on our experiential interpretations of the places we inhabit through our work and domestic lives. Such understandings draw directly from the senses and our bodily engagement in space. In contrast, our analyses and interpretations of the places and sites of others often rely on a different range of skills in which ‘objectivity’ is privileged over personal responses. Such approaches usually rely on short visits in which hard ‘factual’ and visual data is collected quickly. Rarely in architectural or urban studies do researchers live ‘in the field’. This contrasts markedly with anthropology where time spent living in the field is regarded as essential, and such ethnographic studies gain credence and credibility through long periods of residence.

The Anarchitecture group emerged in the early 1970s in New York. Although it has become somewhat synonymous with the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, it had a broad membership of equally significant artists, including Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry and Richard Nonas among others. Philip Ursprung's recent catalogue essay sets out some of the complexities that accompany any attempt to understand the group's internal dynamic, and the problematic conflation of its collective activities to the work, or at least to the ideas, of Matta-Clark.

For the modern architect, the programme for the church was fraught with the dangers of excessive individualism of style or, alternatively, a merely superficial updating of tradition. To escape from both, the architect was, by the early 1960s, being exhorted to study the church's functions. Aware of the difficulties of placing ancient rituals in the same category as the sociology of education or the productivity of offices, architects and like-minded clergy saw the church as a building not only to house certain actions and communications, but also capable of lending these a relevant meaning. The church architect had to discard his preconceptions about the building type, and begin with a new analysis of ritual, and had also, therefore, to find out what the ritual meant by questioning the client and developing a brief. In this research the architect would therefore act as a ritual anthropologist; like the anthropologist, he would encounter some significant methodological problems.

In his introduction to Form Matters, the catalogue accompanying his Design Museum exhibition, which began in London in October 2009 and culminated its tour in Italy earlier this year, David Chipperfield is at once very clear to state that ‘the work of an architect is measured by built work’; but he also emphasises that the body of work shown is ‘the consequence not of individual genius, but of the collaborative efforts of our office and our partners, unified in the belief that architecture can pursue ideas, concern itself with its physical potential and maintain the economic criteria that make these projects possible’. It is a tribute that also implies the organisational structure required to run offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai and to design and build projects in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.