UIA in Istanbul.

To whoops of delight in the packed auditorium of the Istanbul Convention Centre, Peter Eisenman lazily unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the distinctive red and orange strip of Galatasaray, Istanbul's favourite football team. We could only be at a UIA Congress. An accomplished pro, Eisenman has enacted this crowd pleasing stunt on previous occasions, donning the distinctive blue and red stripes of Barcelona in 1996 and a Hertha Berlin shirt in 2002. But having been its willing beneficiary for decades, he now, astonishingly, confessed to a certain ennui and irritation with the whole superstar system. 'We are dancing the last dance', he proclaimed in his lecture punningly entitled 'Architecture Matters'. When Eisenman calls for architecture and architects to quit messing around with semiotics and get with some kind of social programme, it does make you wonder what he's been putting in his tea. But it was a welcome and cogently articulated broadside--against Modernism (the aridity of abstraction), Post Modernism (the good society replaced by the good life) and the current preoccupation with spectacle and meaningless computer generated form-making. 'Something that comes from nothing can go back to nothing' he thundered evangelistically. According to Eisenman, we're at another crucial moment of paradigm shift and the world is holding its breath to see what comes next. The choice is ours.

Though it's easy to sneer at his Damascene conversion, Eisenman's discourse was at least provocative, and bore some relevance to the UIA's overall theme, cumbersomely posited as 'meeting the city with architecture again'. Intended as a riposte to the contemporary urban condition, the UIA conjured up a '50s B-movie nightmare vision of 'the people of the world trapped inside big introvert buildings, skyscrapers, supermarkets and cars unable to experience architecture anymore'. Trapped inside the Lutfi Kirdar Rumeli Hall with 2000 others trying to get a handle to Zaha Hadid's lecture, I began to see their point. My random jottings, in the teeth of visual and aural intelligibility, have an appropriately poetic dislocation--'layering and reconvention of geometry', 'violating certain contextual issues' and lots and lots of 'distortion'. But the Phaeno Science Centre does look fabulous and La Hadid sure knows how to work a room.

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The sheer scale of the UIA enterprise (7000 registered delegates) means that some things do get a bit operatic, but set against Zaha's preening were soothing antidotes such as Glenn Murcutt, whose thoughtful exposition of how his work intimately engages with Australia's climate, landscape and culture brought everyone back to their senses. Murcutt must also be the only architect on the circuit still showing hand-drawn detailed external wall sections. Another star on song was Tadao Ando, recipient of the UIA Gold Medal, whose commitment to environmentally responsive architecture would appear to see him single-handedly re-foresting Japan. Discussing his current work, which included the new subterranean museum in Naoshima Island as an example of architecture deferring to nature (p68), Ando stressed the importance of patience. In one of his earliest projects he proposed a series of landscaped roofs, an idea so unpalatable to his then clients that he was unceremoniously bundled out of their offices. Nearly 40 years later, in his new commercial complex for Omotesando Avenue (Tokyo's Champs Elysees), the concept has finally come to fruition. Tokyo will host the UIA congress in 2011, beating off a challenge from Durban. Turin is next in the triennial spotlight hosting events in 2008.

Outwith the superstar programme, you could take your pick from a plethora of earnest sounding workshops and seminars. From the 'Knitted House Workshop' to 'The Contemporary Hamam', one of the joys of the UIA is that no subject is ever too improbable or bizarre for a round-table discussion. Among the more notable fringe exhibitions was Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza's colonisation of Haghia Eirene, a wonderful sixth-century church that, unusually, was never converted into a mosque like the larger and more famous Haghia Sophia. Baeza's simple, elemental work displayed through drawings, lightboxes and models (complete with a handwritten billel doux from Tom Ford) sat especially well in the church's stark interior. Blowing the AR's trumpet momentarily, former editor Peter Davey was honoured with the UIA's Jean Tschumi Prize (an exceedingly handsome bronze medallion-type thing) for services to architectural criticism.

Modern Istanbul is a pleasantly rackety assault on the senses, stuffed with reminders of its exotic, historic evolution. Yet it has familiar urban problems--overcrowding, pollution, rotting heritage, tottering transport, suburban sprawl. Accommodating the constant influx of new arrivals (around 500 each day) still tends to consume resources, with little left for historical preservation or good new civic buildings. Potential showpiece developments are more often missed opportunities (the glass stump of the Ritz-Carlton, for instance), and the proposals for Haydarpasa station on the Asian shore promise much worse (p22). And in an apt illustration of the drawbacks that often accompany the urge for Western-style 'modernisation', the new Formula One circuit currently under construction to the north of Istanbul is rumoured to be compromising a major water basin.

Yet though Istanbul's population has swollen from 3 million to around 15 million since 1970, somehow it all still sort of works, a theme developed by Charles Correa in one of the UIA's more memorable lectures that went well beyond the usual trawl of recent projects.

Judging by the Indian experience, people would still rather take their chances in cities, with all the associated possibilities for economic and social advancement. For Correa, the energy, complexity, and porosity of the modern metroplis are a cause for celebration and though physical realities may change, the myth of the city endures, locked into and sustained by human consciousness. Delivered on the day London was awarded the 2012 Olympics, Correa's words had a touching resonance, which assumed an even greater potency the next day as news of the terrible tube and bus bombings began to filter through on CNN. In common with London, the plurality of the UIA family only served to emphasise that more things unite than divide. And though the congress experience can be a bit of a physical and intellectual scramble, the simple act of bringing together an international array of architects and planners, designers and academics, students and superstars united by discourse, debate and the sharing of ideas, must offer some hope for a better, saner world.