34 degrees south.

The seventh International Biennial of Architecture took place in Buenos Aires at the end of November, attracting a pantheon of architects, theorists and critics eager to impart enlightenment and escape, albeit briefly, from winter in the northern hemisphere.

With its lushly planted squares and profusion of jacaranda trees, Buenos Aires lived up to its reputation as the 'Paris of South America' - though the 16-lane boulevard ('the widest in the world') that scythes through the urban grid and takes 15 minutes to cross, would give even Haussmann nightmares, and the towering offices and apartment blocks lining the edge of the River Plate have more in common with La Defense than the Left Bank. Not all of Buenos Aires is vertically extruded, however. To the east of the city centre lies the old docklands area of Puerto Madero, where rows of handsome, nineteenth-century brick warehouses are being transformed into offices, flats, cafes and restaurants linked by a waterside promenade.

As Harry Seidler helpfully pointed out during the marathon four-day programme of lectures, Buenos 'Aires lies on the same latitude (34 degrees south) as Sydney, with both cities sharing a Mediterranean climate, New World optimism, geographical remoteness and colonial European umbilical cord. Showing a series of expressive towers and villas, Seidler demonstrated that vertical extrusion is not necessarily a bad thing, if such human requirements as 'food, water and trees' are provided at the base of the skyscrapers, creating a zone of habitation.

Humanizing the built environment was a theme elaborated by numerous speakers, including Frei Otto, whose long commitment to reconciling architecture, green issues and technology ('doing less with more') was evinced in his recent work (the bulbous roof structure of Stuttgart rail way station is based on the self-determining form of a soap bubble) and Herman Hertzberger, who showed how the extraordinary, circular rammed earth structures of provincial China had influenced his social housing schemes in Germany. Hertzberger's thoughtful discourse was amplified by an inventively presented exhibition of recent projects at Buenos Aires' Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Sketches, models, photographs and drawings were precisely yet poetically arrayed within a series of elegantly engineered cabinets.

Away from the conference, some delegates made the pilgrimage to La Plata, just south of Buenos Aires to see Corbusier's remarkable Casa Curutchet, his only built project in Latin America. Designed for a surgeon and his family, the house and surgery was built between 1949 and '55 under the direction of Argentinian architect Amancio Williams. Now the headquarters of the local architects' colegio, the building is evidently well looked after and contains a revealing exhibition of drawings and photographs documenting its history.

Perhaps the most entertainingly provocative speaker of the marathon programme was Joseph Rykwert, who explored the connection between architecture and politics, through a succinct analysis of how cities are zoned for profit and function and how this can be expressed in a monumental architecture - for instance Las Vegas' fake 'historical' buildings have become an easily absorbed substitute for a real past. According to Rykwert, architecture is not simply an expression of society, it represents more profound and potentially sinister political and economic aspirations, which inevitably change, often emasculating the original ideals. Mao's mausoleum in Peking, for example, is now a favourite spot for newly-wed couples' wedding photographs and Russia is still grappling with the problem of what to do with acres of redundant Marxist heroic statuary. Rykwert also discussed the historical link between the completion of the world's highest building and the collapse of global economies, drawing impish parallels with the Chrysler Building in New York and the Great Depression, and Cesar Pelli's Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur with the current Asian economic crisis. It could be speculated that man's urge to build ever higher has, in the manner of the Tower of Babel, conspired to infuriate the heavens, who then invoke punishment upon impudent mortals below. Impelled by the insatiable greed of corporate capitalism, history, it seems, is destined to repeat itself.