Peter Cook: our cosmopolitan correspondent muses on the unexpected joys of architecture getting its wires crossed.

It was in one of those worthy and informative children's books, sporting a thick navy-blue cover embossed with a big badge and called something like 'The World of Exploration'. I loved these books and would return again and again to Ptolemy's maps or pictures of Scottish tribesmen--but was truly bewitched by a black-and-white picture of a massive white thing with windows that grew out of a mountain. Mountain City: there it was, every bit as exciting as the Queen Mary though much less talked about.

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Let's face it, there is a useful cussedness about the young (and the independently minded old). They get suspicious of those movies that everybody says you must see, those inventions that are epoch-making, those buildings that are definitive, those techniques that are seriously sustainable. But a strange hybrid that is neither town nor building nor rock nor misty dream--now that really is something.

Not that I have ever had much desire to schlep out to Tibet and really check out the Potala Palace. Indeed, the increasingly available colour photos, DVDs or whatever suggest that the old hulk is not nearly as homogeneous as I had dreamed and is gilded and painted and almost certainly has a gift shop selling headscarves. I don't want to know. My dream--partly assuaged by visiting Edinburgh Castle and the wonderful way in which it drags itself imperceptibly out of rock and into architecture--is of the notion that building doesn't always have to be a staccato, bit-by-bit condition. After all, Ron Herron (Walking City), Le Corbusier (Unite d'habitation) and Hans Hollein (aircraft carrier on hilltop) have legitimised the idea.

As an architecture student I was casually thumbing through The Architects' Journal and saw some black-and-white drawings of a seriously original building in South America, with rows of tv-screen shaped holes and a weird corner. Of course, Buenos Aires seemed almost as untouchable as Lhasa and twice as exotic. Moreover, this was in the wake of the famous Edward Reynolds Concert Hall at the AA and Bowellism at the Regent Street Poly. Something I could only dream about and then gradually temper over the years, with the increasing cynicism that comes from seeing the reality of so many hyped-up buildings.

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By the time that it had totally softened into a haze, the intrepid Jorge Glusberg unexpectedly whisked me down to Buenos Aires from Sao Paulo (being in the district, so to speak). And there it was, but even better, much better. Absolutely amazing in fact! The published information had dealt with the shapes of parts of Clorindo Testa's Bank of London & South America, but couldn't begin to communicate the brilliance of the space, the sophistication of the detail, the cleverness of the encompassment of a tight city corner. In several subsequent visits to that city (our favourite weekender if it were about 12 hours nearer), I have delighted in wheeling round my friends from other parts of Europe. They too are amazed and gradually join the substantial Testa fan club. However smug we become about the richness and choice of European buildings, there is always the promise of the realisable dream beyond our geographical, but not our buildable, frontiers.

You have to continue intrigued and optimistic. General Franco's big cross that sits on a shelf in the Sierra near to El Escorial is what it is and no more (seen from the air, from near or far), a pompous and cussed object that serves the Faith poorly. The funny pagoda-like tower that peers through the trees in a slightly rolling part of Norfolk serves as a key that unlocks a quaint series of surprises, sufficient to drag a car load of architects and art historians on a detour down some lanes to discover the hauntingness of a burnt-out hall, a handsome Wyattville chapel, a Capability Brown landscaping as well as stories of hangings on hills and royal debauchery.

This delight in unfolding, with ambiguity-laid-upon-ambiguity, is probably a very English taste. It spurred me to set a student project within the grounds and prompted some canny real-estate guys to develop Gunton Hall as a smart apartment address for Norwich businesspeople with a taste for something a little different.

Of course, one learns to cheat the limitations of chance, with old Nikolaus Pevsner, his team of spies and enthusiasts and his books that, despite an overload of fonts and trefoils, contain clues that lead (if you dig hard) to phenomena such as Great Yarmouth Art Nouveau, Suffolk Catalan or Hampshire Fascist. Are these only for the connoisseur, or are they there to knock on the head the idea of high architecture only existing in high places? (I shall return to Yarmouth A-N when next talking about Norway!)

Maybe architecture is at its best when the lines have got slightly crossed, the references slightly melted, the picture usefully smudged. Where inspiration stems from the distortion of detachment and the magic of the wish-dream.