Peter Cook: in alpine Innsbruck, Peter Cook detects the mythological hand of Bloomsbury academe.

Innsbruck University is a funny place to be for a child of the North Sea flatlands who feels more comfortable among winding streets and slow moving rivers: when the surrounding mountains are bearing down on you. A funny place that is increasingly playing host to some of the most interesting of Europe's architects: Volcker Giencke, Patrik Schumacher, Stefano de Martino, Gabrielle Seifert, Kjetil Traedel Thorsen (of Snohetta), Bart Lootsma the critic, as well as Marjan Colletti.

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With keen and busy students, keen and competitive teachers and the playing-out of an intriguing confrontation (or was it a layered set of conversations--we shall see). So Patrik introduced a couple of guys who proceeded to lead us through their progress in a series of of digital manoeuvres: and gradually a clever carpet of enclosure evolved. It twisted around a bit. And that was it. Elegant and more or less consistent.

Ali Rahim from New York and the University of Pennsylvania is the King of these processes. He was there and he tweaked at it. I asked for a bit more architecture. OK. Interesting.

Then Marjan introduced a guy. He had taken a Rococo chapel and then infiltrated it with his own version of digitally generated Rococo. Ali quizzed it. I puzzled at it, but basically enjoyed.Theodore Spyropoulos (who rapidly emerged as the hard man of the afternoon) was less happy.

Then it was some of Patrik's boys again: with a twisted railway station that had good maths, style and (for me) a faint reminiscence of the 'endless knitting' tendency in some of Santiago Calatrava's work. 'Not so', said Patrik almost offended. At this point I should explain that Marcos Cruz was also in the room: Marjan's London colleague and one of the most knowing of all today's designer-critic teachers. He came in with rounded, historically authenticated comments that were careful to get inside work that he probably finds slightly boring.

So next was another of Marjan's Rococo characters: better than the last one. In fact as fruity as hell. By now, the gentlemanly politeness began to break down and what emerged was clearly the fielding of two distinct approaches: one of them procedural and seeking consistencies, the other deliberately wayward and seeking diversion.

Perhaps Rahim and I had been brought in as guru figures: perhaps to represent the outside world--except that everybody at Innsbruck comes in from somewhere else!

So what was being played out was an exposure of something that goes unspoken on the London architectural scene: namely the incorrigible gap in approach between the Bartlett and the AA. We have to remember that Schumacher and Spyropoulos run the Design Research Laboratory at the AA, currently its strongest element, and that Cruz and Colletti run the strongest Unit at the Bartlett. All four of them are cosmopolitan--German, Greek, Portuguese, or Italian--yet all of them have lived in London for several years and gained recognition there. They do occasionally sit on each others' juries up and down Bloomsbury but it's a rare occasion. Moreover, the Innsbruck kids are hungry in a way that the atmosphere at both ends of Bloomsbury doesn't generate. The Bartlett kids are still more in the archiviste tradition of the 'school swot' and the AA lot exude elan.

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Yet they are all aware of the world regard that London is somehow 'where it's at' and conscious of the mythologies of both of their academies.

Innsbruck, on the other hand, is hard to get to. Zaha has made the Ski Station and Dominique Perrault the smart hotel, but (to once again, recall Peter Eisenman), there's no 'scene' there.So in a way, one feels free to say whatever one wants to say. To give it to these hungry students full on.

If they go true to form, these Austrians will run with it all, pervert it, craft it, creep up into some valley or other and digitalise their way in and out of its crevices, or go to Vienna and infiltrate it into some back street or turn up in California and be the sweetest manipulator of it among the Hollywood Hills. Whether it be the more dogmatic approach or the more Romantic, they'll quizzically interpret it.

Meanwhile, I can turn back to a clever observation that Marcos Cruz had made a week or two before: namely that the AA DRL took on something of the Partisan Modernist spirit in its digital Heroics. To which I might now add that, perhaps, the Bartlett has absorbed more of the Arts and Crafts tradition of invention than I would have ever surmised. The English scene always had difficulty with Modernism as it does now with Heroics. Yet I am only too aware of the tender trap as well as the boffin-like delights of English craft-invention.

I am amused that Schumacher must have to take a justifiably schoolmasterly role within the Hadid laboratory and becomes more wayward and inventive in the process. I am equally aware that the Bartlett has fewer international alliances than the AA: but remains more the original and fascinating.

In the end, too, I was a little lonely, for there were no other English critics who might have interwoven the odd anecdote or quaint apocryphal reference that would have exploded into a creative giggle. Reminding one that these confrontations are all just a little bit too serious to let you explore more diverse avenues: but then, you don't get avenues in the Alps, do you?