Peter Cook: The architecture of fast food kiosks gives specific identity to streets and cities.

At last it has stopped being cold in northern Europe and we have an excuse to escape the trappings and serious apparatus of our city. We can drift in and out of marinas, beaches, woodland glades, or even pretend that we don't recognise the system of other peoples' cities since we're only passing through as tourists.

Queuing up for a beer, a postcard, the inevitable AA battery or something more exotic, why should we care about architecture? But if we're fanatics, members of a private club that I would dearly like to launch (whose members are condemned to finding architectural messages in almost anything), that queue can be one of the most delicious parts of the hunt.

Two-to-one it will be at a freestanding object, probably on wheels. Ten-to-one it will be regularly sited at that spot. Then the fun begins. Would you really go out of your way to buy your hot-dog from an elegantly profiled Airstream van with customised sales-side--deliberately walking past a Swiss-timber shed affair and past the concrete mini-bunker that sells bigger and better buns?

In the 'proper' world of restaurants we do just that: discussing ambience or decor along with the food. But here, remember, we're playing tourist. We're tired. We're hungry. And these kiosks--well, they're not things to be taken seriously are they? But then why not?

In the 1930s, the German Modernists had the solution: they placed neat little buildings, with a rounded canopy, at the end of each tree-lined boulevard. Exported Modernist cities did the same. So you can be forgiven, momentarily, for confusing Frankfurt's Holbeinstrasse with Tel Aviv's Ben Yehuda Street because they share exactly the same model. Look closer and you will get few clues until you engage with the kiosk-keeper. The sad-eyed Turk in Frankfurt will eventually admit to selling twenty or thirty types of wine as well as the odd comb and hairbrush. His opposite number in TA has already painted the little building cream and yellow, hung pineapples and bananas down three sides and grins as he thumps big oranges through the juice-masher. Across the street, in a much less generic hut, a shoe-mender sits waiting for custom with his can of beer, cigarette and (after about 4pm) a bunch of cronies who are anyhow wearing trainers.

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In Malmo, the 'poelser' sausage is celebrated in a locally fashioned red, rounded, tin caravan that is deliberately unlike the cabins just over the water in Copenhagen, selling the same sausage. In Tallinn, Estonia, a quirky architectural consciousness encouraged for the last twenty years by Vilem Konnapu and a bunch of friends has led the city to commission unquestionably Constructivist kiosks--each with flaps and wings that distinguish this one from the next.

My first-year holiday job was on Bournemouth beach selling fruit in a round-cornered tin box with 70 wasps. I've rarely enjoyed myself as much. I sold apples and peaches, ignored the wasps, unravelled the Lancashire accents--and probably, at that point, fell in love with the idea of the machined capsule.

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There is this lovely combination of order and freedom, the demand and logic of restricted space: you know what you've got, with the private world that relies upon enterprise and the option to move the operation on to where the action might be.

Stretch the brief and you get a generic Archigram favourite: the building that is a vehicle. Best examples so far are the red motorbike opposite Anglia TV in Norwich, which flaps out into a miniature espresso-coffee bar, or the lady somewhere in downtown Seoul whose flapping plastic-sheathed stall has a giant air-conditioning motor as the main feature. Watch carefully: the same coffee-van that sat outside Brighton station last year now has the audacity to drive right inside. Roll over hot-desking!

The burst of free enterprise in Moscow has triggered 'working-part' kiosks downtown, so the 'ok guv, just moving on' aspect is reflected in the wheels and flaps and smart paint, whereas in scruffier patches of land, little villages of huts selling vegetables or ice-cream look as if they're set to become the next generation's barriadas.

Beyond my English predilection for the picturesque, I believe that these little buildings remind us of the creative value of the immediate and the logical, the uninhibited and the upfront. We intend (in Madrid, as it happens) to pull them into the vocabulary of the architecture itself.

All that smart talk in schools of architecture about the 'happy parasite' could just happen.