Architecture shows and biennales have proliferated in the last decade, accompanied by new courses and publications on architectural curation. The curation of an exhibition can be as complex and political as the realisation of a work of architecture. It can be presented as an effective vehicle for critical discourse, challenging the traditional definition of architectural practice as the design, procurement and construction of a building. In response, existing architecture exhibition spaces are adapting and new galleries are opening, reconceptualising modes of display. This review considers two contrasting architecture exhibitions on show in London at the turn of 2011, each with different agendas, ambitions and audiences.

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.

Recollecting Landscapes is a rephotographic survey project which documents a century of landscape transformation in Belgium. It is based on the successive photography of sixty sites at three moments in time between 1904 and 2004 [1, 2]. This paper takes the project as a starting point to investigate the subject of the image and its presentation. This means that the text develops some thoughts on how the images in the project are displayed and read, rather than on the content they display.

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.

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.

The question of the nature of knowledge is vital in understanding the relation between research and practice. This question is vital, not least for architectural researchers since they often have to struggle with a rationalist ideal that research-based knowledge must be context-independent. But architects ‘know’ that this kind of knowledge does not cover the need for knowledge in architecture and design, a field between the humanities, social sciences and technology. Several volumes of arq contain articles and letters on this subject.

Our paper examines the Brick House, completed by Caruso St John Architects in 2005. Nearly invisible from the street with its unusual form and ‘brick’ nomenclature, this clearly is no ordinary house. Despite or perhaps because of its elusive character, which confounds expectations, the house has won universal praise from commentators but has prompted little deeper analysis. The architects set out their agenda for the project in an allusive text that, despite intriguing contradictions, has remained largely unquestioned.

The Japanese dry garden apart, water has been an essential ingredient in all garden-making. From its sources in agricultural and other modes of food production, water has been used to irrigate and maintain a host of necessary functions, some of which, like the water wheel in Mediterranean cultures [1], have been (and still are) crucial elements of agricultural cultivation.

But the other crucial feature of water, unless it is manipulated in some way by human agency, is its capacity to seek the path of least resistance. It may wear away rocks and soils, but essentially it seeks to find the easier and least resistant path through the local elements. The manipulation of water, then, in designed landscapes is a cultural mode of soliciting from water its best features, drawing out its performative aspects. But the features deemed ‘best’ are the result of a whole range of objectives that transcend physical properties to communicate and exploit specific and very local cultural capabilities.

The desire to learn about buildings, cities and cultural artefacts by journeying to experience them in situ pervades architectural history. It can be seen in the rise of the grand tour in the eighteenth century, subsequent formalised academic study tours, the ascendancy of cultural museums in the nineteenth century, and the institutionalisation of heritage sites and attractions in the twentieth century. More informally, such journeys are pursued in personal and less prescriptive ways through habitual urban strolling and site-seeing.

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.

John Evelyn (1620–1706) is a prominent character in the historiography of seventeenth-century science. His friendships with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and Sir Thomas Browne, to name a few, ensure this, as does the huge volume of relevant archival material that he left behind. He was not particularly accomplished as a scientist, or natural philosopher to use the contemporary term, but he did engage earnestly with the project of establishing new experimentalist directions for the investigation of nature, both in the Royal Society after its establishment in the early 1660s, and in other milieux in the lead up to that event. As a figure in garden historiography, Evelyn is equally important. He was not a professional gardener, but a gentleman educated for public office. However, until the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the year he turned forty, he was excluded from public service because of his political allegiances – he was a Royalist. The 1650s were for Evelyn a decade of retirement, and from this time come both the gardens at Wotton – the topic of this paper – and his own famous garden at Sayes Court in Deptford, established in 1653. It was also the time when he composed much of the material on gardening and other virtuoso topics that he published both during that decade and subsequently.

Perhaps unexpectedly, architects are seldom talked about in terms of the building toys they once played with or what they constructed with them. Exceptions are Witold Rybczynski and Frank Lloyd Wright. The former describes John Ruskin mastering the laws of building for load-bearing towers and arches by the time he was seven or eight (around 1825) because of playing with wooden building blocks (introduced at the end of the 1700s). However, he also describes himself playing with Bayko. This was a Bakelite building set from the 1930s [1], probably modelled on Mobaco, a cardboard and wood Dutch construction toy [2]. Both of these toys are pre-dated by an 1887 English toy for house construction, the walls of which were made from wooden blocks threaded on to vertical wires. Rybczynski also describes watching his father and uncle build a real garden shed using concrete panels slipped between reinforcing bars, like the method used by the plastic toy but life-size.

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.

Modern architecture has always had a complex relationship with its own utopian roots. From Marinetti proclaiming that war is the most beautiful choreography in 1918 to Le Corbusier's famous concluding sentence from 1923, ‘architecture can avoid revolution’, the attempt to build a better world through architecture has constantly been tainted by skewed definitions of what exactly this new world should be. The case of Brazil is not much different. The architecture of the 1930s and '40s was much more successful in promoting a national image of modernisation than in addressing modernisation as such. Traditional gender roles abide in modern housing design, which sadly has also absorbed class (and racial) inequalities in its spatial organisation. This paper departs from the discussion of the origins of modern architecture in Brazil to discuss the extent to which certain inequalities were so thoroughly embedded in Brazilian society that they were even incorporated into a utopian discourse about modernity - a discourse that is still very much present.

Recent scholarly work has shifted our attention to the ways in which gardens negotiated the particularities of their ecological situation. New studies look at the archaeology of gardens, a fundamentally architectural shift which excavates issues of resource use. Materially specific research which sets gardens back into their hydraulic and topographic context has illuminated new dimensions of their inventive praxis. Many gardens turn out, in fact, to have been very carefully constructed in relation to a sensitive reading of local hydrological conditions. What is more, the facts of these sources seem also to be integrally enmeshed with their spatial and poetic aspects, providing salutary examples as our attention returns to what we are now calling sustainability.

While waiting for class two years ago one of my students looked at the back of the room where two unused slide projectors stood. ‘But’, he wondered out loud – having no history of comparative slide projection – ‘how come you have two of them?’ His remark speaks directly to the rapid change from print to pixel and about the transformation of the lecture room, the place where this change has been most sharply felt: pixels are our daily habit, our night-time curse, and our weekend distraction.

I wanted to get into the real world – not that the Jane Drew world was very real, considering what was going on. We were fiddling around with six, I think it was, wartime agricultural cottages and then Jane got this famous job of Kitchen Consultant to the Gas Council. She was appointed to do kitchens because women architects were supposed to know about kitchens.

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.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the discovery of Pompeii attracted European aristocrats to include the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Southern Italy) on their Grand Tour itinerary. Similarly, Sybaris, an ancient Greek colonial polis also directed aristocratic attention to the region. French painter and engraver Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non and his entourage of architects most famously documented the ruinous Sybaris and exported its imagery back to France. In parallel with these developments, interest in recreating sybaritic images within luxurious Picturesque gardens arose. Drawing upon a pair of garden case studies, Monsieur de Monville's Broken Column House (1780–81) at Désert de Retz, Chambourcy, and Queen Marie-Antoinette's hameau (1783) within the Petit Trianon Gardens at Versailles, this paper examines the sybaritic images, their influences and the ethical values of the creators of these gardens. Monville and Marie-Antoinette were, for instance, charged of excess. This paper is concerned with the way in which these sybaritic places were configured and how they encapsulated a mythic Sybaris, and argues that the charges of excess levelled against their creators partly stemmed from the unusual and sybaritic effects to be found at their private entertainment gardens.

When I first started researching the work of the Edwardian architect Horace Field (1861–1948), I soon realised that this was a man whose achievements could best be measured in terms quite antithetical to those conventionally used by architectural historians. Nearly all buildings are judged on the basis of their originality; and, if they are old, on the basis of their influence or their relationship to what subsequently became a significant direction in the arts or culture of their time. Even in a field such as the history of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, transformed by Mark Girouard and Alistair Service forty or more years ago, a story has only been worth telling when it is a story. If a collection of buildings adds up to very little, what then? Field's buildings are mostly incidental to other more interesting, more imaginative stories. Was he a failure, then, in designing buildings which fail to appear in their own right as part of a critical canon? Was he a failure too, in that his career started so promisingly and tailed away to nothing; that he was tucked away in rural Sussex, in Rye, fiddling about with old buildings and designing garages and cheap villas, while other architects of his generation spent their final years on some of the most enthralling projects of their lives? Or does the story of Field's career suggest that there are other ways to evaluate an architectural career than to tell the story of its conventionally-defined successes?