The stones of Venice. (View).

Truman Capote once observed that 'Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go', a sentiment that might equally apply to the city's eighth Architecture Biennale, arrayed in all its customary pomp and pretension in the Castello Gardens and the great ropeworks and munitions sheds of the Arsenale. This time the press vernissage coincided with the tail end of the Venice Film Festival, so an intoxicating menage of cinematic and architectural luminaries could be spotted on assorted corniches, landing stages, restaurants and hotel lobbies. Native Venetians, who have had their fill of tired and emotional visitors (from the Queen of Cyprus and Napoleon to Byron swimming in the Grand Canal), remain admirably unmoved by such brushes with celebrity, stoically wrapping binliners around their feet to wade through the equinoxal acqua alta in St Mark's Square. (Many stars from both film and architectural firmaments still cherish the illusion that they actually can walk on water...)

In the Biennale director's chair this time was Deyan Sudjic, current editor of Domus, who kept instructions to his vast cast of architects, exhibition designers, cultural commissioners and general hangers-on simple and was rewarded with one of the more interesting and coherent shows of recent times. Sudjic's unifying theme of 'Next' had a strong whiff of branding about it (What Comes Next, Up Next, Next Generation, Next Technology, Next Places), but was essentially an attempt to track the progress of architecture over the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was also elastic and accommodating enough to sustain different interpretations and the familiar flummoxing diversity when representatives from over thirty countries, from Austria to Venezuela, are invited to make some kind of grandiose arid definitive architectural statement.

Crammed into the leafy acres of the Giardini, the familiar array of national pavilions jostled like eager contestants in a beauty pageant. Britain threw all its eggs in the Foreign Office basket, with a sophisticated multimedia presentation of the Yokohama Port Terminal, perhaps the first landmark building of the new century. At times it was like being in a Mayfair disco or Warhol Happening, as drawings, photographs and digital images slowly teemed, swarmed, morphed and mutated over walls and ceilings. Concentrating on the work of a single practice (and even more specifically on a single project by that practice) marked a distinct departure from previous British shows, which had hitherto embraced a wider range of work by several different architects (the last British Pavilion boasted a line-up of Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Nigel Coates and Will Alsop, AR July 2000). But the FO exhibition had an undeniably seductive power despite its disconcerting penchant for ultra-violet light that makes people's teeth go funny. And the terminal itself looks truly extraordinary.

Like Britain, Ireland exhibited a singular focus, with a modest but finely judged exhibition on Limerick County Hall by the talented American/Irish partnership of Merrit Bucholz and Karen McEvoy. A series of 6m long fibreglass moulds used to form the floor slabs were assembled to create a giant gilled sculpture; building components as art. The Brits seemed to be on course for the Golden Lion (for Best in Show), but instead it went to the Netherlands for Fresh Facts, edited highlights of a biennial award organized by the Netherlands Architecture Institute for the best building by a Dutch architect under 40. Conceived by Herman Hertzberger, the exhibition had a lucidity and economy admirably suited to the spare, luminous interior of Gerrit Rietveld's pavilion.

France also concentrated on its emerging younger generation, embracing a formal diversity that ranged from the (largely unbuilt) digital provocation of dECOi, to the intriguing proposals of Du Besset-Lyon (who worked for Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry). Their (built) library at Troyes sported a gorgeous undulating metal mesh ceiling, a section of which was diligently mocked up for inspection. The French delight in and preoccupation with doing interesting things with materials seems almost British in its Heath Robinsonian ingenuity and conceit.

At the Finish Pavilion, visitors were greeted by the soft squelch of sand underfoot to reinforce (in an appropriately phenomenological way) the exhibition's concern with Africa. Learning from Roots was devoted to work in Senegal and Guinea by young Finnish architects, bridging huge geographical, cultural and social gulfs to work with local communities in ways that go beyond simply designing buildings. Hollmen Reuter Sandman's Women's Centre in Senegal (AR July 2002) sensitively challenges Western preconceptions about the place of architecture in society. Another low key but equally compelling national contribution came from Brazil, showing ways in which Brazilian architects were attempting to assimilate the country's huge, sprawling, illegitimate favelas (home to the marginalized and dispossessed) into the formal fabric of cities. Low budget projects for shelter, sanitation and roads were timely reminders of the transforming potential of architectural imagination.

From opening remarks by a man from the State Department, to a horribly contorted steel beam pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, events in the US pavilion were understandably overshadowed by the grim legacy of 11 September. Over the last year, photographer Joel Meyerowitz has taken 7000 shots of the site and its aftermath, a selection of which were on display in Venice. One of the most affecting images was not the impenetrable gloopy tangle of rusted metal (the buildings literally melted), but a lone incinerated tree stump in the adjacent piazza. Looking more speculatively to the future, the pavilion also featured part of the exhibition from New York's Max Protetch Gallery (AR March 2002), in which some 50 architects were canvassed for redevelopment proposals. However the painful process of renewal is currently bogged down by the complexities of client ownership, greed, political infighting and a general lack of vision.

Despite the destruction of two of the world's tallest buildings, there seems no shortage of enthusiasm for the skyscraper per se. Towers featured prominently in the huge Arsenale exhibition, adroitly curated by Sudjic. Subdivided typologically, it encompassed projects by over 90 architects, from housing and shopping to museums and masterplans. The vast naval sheds formed a backdrop to a cornucopia of models, drawings and electronic images, unified by John Pawson's elegant exhibition design, although the Towers section, with soaring contributions from, among others, Future Systems, Jean Nouvel, Hans Hollein and Lords Foster and Rogers did rather resemble a collection of colourful, outsized vibrators.

The scale of the Arsenale's interiors meant that large models and mock-ups could be shown with comparative ease, giving insight into the beguiling textural and haptic qualities of buildings, the real stuff of architecture. From Peter Cook's Graz Kunsthaus, with its dramatic, full-scale illuminated wall section to Peter Zumthor's complex and beautiful models of the diocesan museum in Cologne; from Toyo Ito's house in Groningen with its innovative 'metal bricks' (brick-shaped aluminium extrusions that slot together and can be glazed to form a transparent 'brick' wall), to Diller and Scofidio's Eyebeam School, a sumptuous layer cake of folded planes -- all this innovation and imagination 'make visible the scale and substance of what comes next' as director Sudjic puts it. I'd say that's a wrap.

8th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice runs until 3 November.

Further information www.labiennale.org

All photographs by Paul Raftery/ VIEW