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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For architects, intellectual property (IP) law is vital. Without it plans, building designs and models would have no value as others could copy them without payment. But what are an architect's rights and how are those rights retained in order to avoid commercial exploitation?

The legislation for this area of law comes from the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), the Registered Designs Act 1949, the Trade Marks Act 1994 and the Patents Act 1977. IP itself is divided into those rights that are registrable at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and those that are not. Rights that must be registered before the work is protected include trademarks, patents and registered designs; IP rights that cannot be registered include copyright and unregistered design rights.

A significant development in urban history was the emergence of the Garden City movement at the end of the nineteenth century, inspired by the writings and actions of Ebenezer Howard. The movement would generate a broad range of urban typologies and various visionary models of the city during the twentieth century. The Garden City was a direct response to what were perceived to be the evils of large industrial cities and attempted to reunite country and town, particularly through the residential garden and the act of gardening. Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's assemblage theory I examine gardens and gardening, and the agencies inherent to these. By evoking the early history of the first Garden City at Letchworth, we can ask what role can gardens and gardeners play in addressing contemporary urban issues? [1].

During 2008–10, I was the Artist in Residence of the Leverhulme Trust, at the National Oceanography Centre, (NOCS), Southampton, working with sonar geophysicist Dr Tim Le Bas, exploring methods of seabed mapping and undersea survey. During this period I documented aspects of oceanographic study, learnt processes used by my scientific colleagues, conducted performative interventions and made works in direct response to the context of NOCS. The work produced was shown at an exhibition at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff in 2009 and will be developed into a larger exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton in 2012. This article constitutes both a re-presentation of my primary research and a reflection on the methods I adopted to address the issues raised by my inquiries. Works produced are both referred to directly and represented via supplementary documentation.