Peter Cook: from London to Vienna via Paris and Norway--the style is international.

The great advantage of the old, pre 1990s, idea of the 'International Style' was that you could apply it to such a wide range of stuff: usually flat roofed, white walled, strip windowed. Good, bad, ugly and often, to the trained eye, interpreted in quite a local or regional manner. It could even be codified and given some intellectual validity by a Henry-Russell Hitchcock or a J. M. Richards and used by less scrupulous commentators to force a set of disciplines onto what was often a free-fall situation. Yet inevitably it was doomed to become suspect, or at least unfashionable.

We couldn't resist a finer grained partisanship and, just as the old convenience of international communism broke down to reveal festering religious and ethnic paranoias, new architecture broke down into Po-Mo, High-Tech, Rat, De-Con, Neo-Mod and ... The search goes on, and to return to an earlier theme, architects of the 'chattering' class write to the newspapers, sit in sweaty rooms in festival-time Venice or, as I discovered last Saturday, brave the Viennese snow in their hundreds to discuss the idea of 'identity'. The bright locals, regional punters and the odd hijacked outsider combine oddly, but it was significant that the one or two heroes present, international role models, stole the show. Not only because they represent work that is palpably finer, but because they exuded confidence, wit and made cultural references that were far from local, without any trace of self-consciousness.

This was sandwiched between a marathon performance at London's AA by the great Diva (Zaha Hadid) and an extraordinary display in the Centre Pompidou by this year's Pritzker Giant (Thom Mayne). In the first, it became almost a sub-plot (beneath the elan of the work itself), that the production had an international cast, to judge from the surnames receiving the bouquets being generously offered by Herself. In the latter event there was a truly family atmosphere (even if Mrs Mayne was kept out of the building for an hour in the rain by a French jobsworth). The family came from everywhere and the products were both particular and international, though Angeleno in origin and culture.

It makes me ponder on the fact that the quintessentially English personality of David Chipperfield prefers his office to be motored by a Swiss, Spanish, Italian, Argentinian force without too many locals, or that Maxi Fuksas exudes fascination with the Paris or London sceneries. It has long been a shorthand in London that if you want to create a diligent but creative atmosphere in the office, you need at least two or three of those Germans who listen, bother and dig, dig, dig. LA specialises in Austrians, preferably from Helmut Richter's TU class--but any Austrian will do: watch the finesse of the detailing shoot up! A Francophile Brit is just the thing in a good Paris office, to provide that element of cynicism as a motivator rather than cynicism as a pose.

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Scrutinise this month's most talked-about duo: Helen and Hard of Stavanger, Norway. Observe how they feed their urbane take on nonchalant-tech, from their own Austro-Nordic combination via French assistants and English networking. Too easy for us just to say, 'but this is just international traffic'. Apart from the gossip, it is the architecture itself that has become cosmopolitan. The exchange of iconography, digital processing, technical detail, sources of manufacture buzzes across the waves.

The smartest intellects make their postgraduate studies in another country. Anyone with ambition to become an independent operator knows that he or she should move cities and get the hang of move-making from a variety of sources--and this applies as much to the stuff as to the procedures. Anyone who wants to zoom through the big office system may need the negotiable credit points from a five-year spell at Foster's that gives them a cachet in all parts of the world. But is the architecture English? Is Zaha English? Mayne German? Chipperfield Swiss? H & H Danish? What does it mean? The present situation is altogether more involved and more challenging.

There are of course rearguards, or bastions. I watch amused as our sister magazine, The Architects' Journal, nails its colours to the mast of the English 'contemplative-whisper-modesty-brick' school, which may, in the great tradition of minor European regionalist pockets, serve a purpose. But it is unlikely to affect the swathe of enthusiasm for the great rolling waves of surface enjoyed by the international players. Yet this is not a new international style--not yet, anyway. It is too dependent upon the cleverness of its leaders, and any of them had better have a staying power that avoids too many repeats.

Mies didn't have to get bored with himself. Corb shifted ground only when he wanted. Our present heroes do not have our reassurance that this will do.