Hamburg Summer: from scholarly exhibitions to offbeat happenings, Hamburg's fifth triennial Architecture Summer festival is a polymorphous feast for all the senses.

Hyped by Germany's success as World Cup hosts and reeling from tropical temperatures, Hamburg's traditional reticent character transformed itself into carnival exuberance for its fifth Architecture Summer. Bigger and more varied than previous triennial events (AR July 2003), the 2006 programme boasted 270 exhibitions, discussions, tours, films and workshops, and was coordinated from an information Architekturbox beside the Alster lake. The temporary pavilion of stacked coloured glass boxes provided a viewing platform and cafe from which to appreciate the newly modernised Jungfernstieg lakeside terraces, against a skyline of spiritual spires and modern shopping emporiums.

Events are staggered over seven months, from April to November. Along with introspective retrospectives concentrating on the German speaking world (industrial architect Godber Nissen, church architect Dominikus Bohm, social architect and Hamburg's Building Senator Gustav Oelsners), there was also an array of 'exotic' architecture from Teheran, Shanghai, Mumbai, the Piedmont Alps, Damascus and the traditional Orient, as well as works from Prague to Zurich designed by 2005 Tessenow Prize winner Miroslav Sik.

Historical and avant-garde events were equally balanced. Projects instigated by a succession of Hamburg's Building Directors, from Carl Ludwig Wimmel to Fritz Schumacher, could be compared to contemporary works by Delugan Meissl Associates (for the Porsche Museum, Vienna airport, Amsterdam Film Museum, Adidas and Beijing), von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (for Berlin and China), and Hamburg's highly publicised future trademark, the Elbphilharmonie designed by Herzog & de Meuron (AR September 2004). Heroines of architecture are always thin on the ground, but a unique exhibition by the Wenzel Hablik Museum in Itzehoe presented women of the European Modern Movement in the 1920s.

The success of the Hamburg Triennial has meant that temporarily rented-out shop units, commercial firms, private galleries, schools, parks and theatres, now jostle to present themes initiated by interior designers, musicians, landscape architects, engineers, artists, photographers, socio-pedagogic groups and students, alongside the academically curated exhibitions in public museums. Events are so thick on the ground it is hard for even non-German visitors not to find at least a handful which arouse their interest. In 'Eating City' children were invited to build a city out of dough and in the developing HafenCity (AR April 2006) they could put on hard hats to realise their own designs in bricks and mortar. A 12 day building-art-action offered hands on experience with clay, creating constructions up to 3m high. Perhaps most bizarrely of all, Annette Streyl exhibited her three-dimensional knitted models of Albert Speer's Berlin Germania, the Reichstag, Palast der Republik, the AT & T building in New York and a McDonald's.

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There are virtually no taboos, global or local, as long as initiators can find sponsors and space. The unrecognised architecture of domestic living rooms from Warsaw to New York, captured in photographs by the Danish artist Annette Merrild, were as valid as an exhibition of theoretical 'urban units' conceived by Karsten Drohsel and Malte Steiner, architecture in outer space, the recycling of offices into flats, or an investigation of how people adapt their Bauhaus designed homes and workplaces.

From a photographic investigation of 'the socio-political meaning of the sports experience in stadium design compared to a mythical pilgrimage', to research on 'architecture as an editor of its surroundings' staged by the Institute of Cultural Policy, or Wallpaper photographer Markus Dorfmuller's documentary of the Reeperbahn, Hamburg's infamous sex workers' district, the cultural tourist can only come away dazzled and dazed. Everything, it seems, is architecture.

www.architektursommer.de