Venetian anthropology.

City of skin deep surfaces, stage-set superficiality and swarms of visitors, Venice is the perfect setting for the array of circus-like distractions that constitute an average architecture Biennale. As in previous years, the frantic press vernissage overlapped with the tail end of the Venice Film Festival, bestowing an extra sprinkling of stardust on proceedings. The Film Festival's closing gala was held in the rebuilt La Fenice opera house, finally and triumphantly back in use after the catastrophic fire of 1996.

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Film and architecture have much in common. Both are collaborative processes, but like to pretend that they are the vision of a single auteur. Both also require the suspension of disbelief. This was, at times, a necessary mental prelude to some of the Biennale's more outlandish offerings and conceits. As usual, the action was divided between the Corderie (ropemaking sheds) of the Arsenale (where at its height the serene republic churned out a galley a day), and the Eurovision gaggle of national pavilions in the nearby Giardini. These were augmented by a handful of nomadic exhibitions around the city, covering subjects as diverse as Lina Bo Bardi, Taiwan, and station design. Devised by Swiss writer and academic Kurt Forster, a former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the thematic cue of this ninth Biennale was Metamorph, intended to induce exploration and discussion of the effects of change (technical, theoretical, formal, biological) on architecture and prompt speculation on the new forms it might engender.

In practice, in the Arsenale at least, this generated room after room of warps, folds, buckles, morphs, globs and blobs loosely yoked together under suitably nebulous headings ('Topography', 'Episodes', 'Surfaces', 'Atmosphere' and so on). In purely visual terms it was undeniably impressive, with banks of models occupying monumental curved displays that soared through the cavernous interiors. Sadly, fashionably minimal captioning meant that it was often unclear what was actually built, in progress or aborted, so giving the impression of projects cut simply to fit the Metamorph cloth. Much of the stuff, as it turned out, was unbuilt, and the obvious acid test of such computer enabled fantasies will be when they finally emerge in the flesh, from behind the seductive gauze of imagineering.

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Among the handful of standouts in this digital zoo were Zaha Hadid's model of Wolfsburg Science Centre (now on site, AR January 2004) and Enric Miralles' undulating khaki patterned roof over the historic Santa Caterina market in Barcelona. Still in Spain and still in Barcelona, Juan Navarro Baldeweg appears to be doing something interesting with sculptural cladding (like a three-dimensional doily) in a new building for Pompeu Fabra University. In Japan, Toyo Ito's proposal for a new Tod's store in Tokyo, wrapped in a translucent, arboreal skin looks characteristically exquisite, and Kazuyo Sejima's new contemporary art museum at Kanazawa, also under construction, imaginatively re-envisages the modern gallery type as a circular enclosure randomly perforated by internal courtyards.

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A greater sense of coherency underscored the individual national exhibitions in the secondary wing of the Corderie. Inventively tucked into limited space, Portugal's elegant dissemination of new work by its younger generation was thoughtful and assured, reinforcing the assertion made in these pages (AR July 2004) that architecture in that country has a lively future. Similarly, Chile and Scotland, both nations on the geographical margins (and in Scotland's case at the furthest foot slogging physical extremity of the Corderie) presented surprisingly animated tours d'horizons of current activity. Estonia's colourful survey of the nation's al fresco earth closets (artfully cannibalized from structures as disparate as boat hulls and disused sentry boxes) had both rustic charm and a welcome sense of authenticity.

Ireland opted for the particular rather than the general, with curator Shane O'Toole choosing to focus on a single project--O'Donnell and Tuomey's Furniture College in rural Letter-frack. Built on the site of a still extant nineteenth-century industrial school for orphans and the destitute (originally run by the now notorious Christian Brothers), O'Donnell and Tuomey's project is powerfully emblematic of how such institutions, once an integral part of Irish social and cultural life, can and must change, given vital momentum by the transforming power of architecture. A beautifully crafted mock-up of the roof structure made a suitably solemn focus in a spare, simple room which offered a much needed pause for thought and breath amid all the cyber visuals.

In the Giardini, Peter Cook was in charge of the British Pavilion which sported an appropriately kaleidoscopic, Archigramesque banner (designed by Morag Myerscough) over its sober Neo-Classical frontage. This has been something of an annus Cookabilis (his Graz Kunsthaus, AR March 2004, is shortlisted for the Stirling Prize), and you got the sense that he was thoroughly enjoying his moment as head boy in Venice, under the auspices of the British Council (cheerily celebrating its 70th anniversary). Cook's smorgasbord of nine UK-based architects, none of whom had ever been shown in the British Pavilion before, had a deliberately engineered strange bedfellows quality to it. John Pawson's clinically austere Novy Dvur Monastery (AR April 2004) butted up to the priapic fatuousness of Future Systems; Richard Murphy's precise, Scarpa-inspired projects segued into off-the wall jokiness from Ron Arad. Cook showed an impressively huge freehand drawing executed with Gavin Robotham outlining a proposal to green East London (complete with real tomatoes in grow-bags).

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Perhaps inevitably, the overall effect was that of a curate's egg, but Cook's carefully choreographed homage to British eccentricity had the edge on both the Dutch and the Swiss. Twin powerhouses of contemporary architectural theory and practice they may be, but both produced surprisingly low-key pavilions this year. Another disappointment was Japan, garishly plastered with quasi-pornographic manga cartoons as part of a mundane investigation into the lives of otaku, Japanese computer nerds.

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Germany and Spain were both thoroughly workmanlike in their trawl of recent architecture, but the Germans had the edge in a more dynamic exhibition design which cunningly collaged new buildings into a typical urban panorama. Canada showed work by Saucier + Perrotte with projects displayed electronically in a horizon-like strip, and then abstracted into welded steel sculptures. The United States, whose opening night party at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum is one of the social high-spots of the vernissage, assembled a diverse batch of young architects including Predock Frane, who filled a room full of suspended filaments to create magical yet disturbing optical effects.

The Nordic countries, housed in Sverre Fehn's wonderful luminous concrete pavilion, produced a typically understated yet compelling meditation on the relationship between architecture and nature. Finland explored a familiar national theme of timber building, complete with wood models and samples, embodying perhaps the ultimate metamorphosis from the natural to the man-made. Denmark, curated by Canadian graphic wunderkind Bruce Mau, took a sly, sideways look at Danish Modernism and how it might evolve to respond to the current ecological crisis. One 'crazy-but-it-just-might-work' proposal involved shipping iceberg meltwater in huge, floating 'Medusa bags from Greenland (a Danish territory) to Africa to help alleviate water shortages and boost the Greenlandic economy. Some countries used the opportunity to explore notions of process rather than product. France, for instance, under the direction of Francoise-Helene Jourda, exhibited the outcome of a charrette to masterplan a site in northern Paris that could suggest new paradigms for sustainable development. Russia went one better, staging a series of student workshops that will take place throughout the Biennale, but such extreme earnestness made for slightly dull viewing. The Italian pavilion was dominated by big, empty statements Peter Eisenman's huge climbing frame installation, with its Piranesian stairs to nowhere and Massimo Scolari's collapsed Tower of Babel but around the periphery there were more considered moments, from a computer-generated reconstruction of Ivan Leonidov's Constructivist 'City of the Sun', to the gentle, domestic interior photographs of Paolo Rosselli.

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The Golden Lion award for best pavilion went deservedly to Belgium for a fascinating study of Kinshasa, capital of the former Belgian Congo and now a post-colonial African city struggling to cope with the familiar problems of rising population and tottering infrastructure. Beyond the physical and geographical realities, however, Kinshasa's six million citizens concoct and live out a rich imaginary existence fuelled by religion, superstition and television soap operas. Displayed with stark simplicity through a series of videos and blackboards, this was curiously compelling viewing that offered fresh insights into the urban condition. Anthropology meets architecture in an expanding modern Invisible City.

Metamorph 9th International Architecture Exhibition, Arsenale and Giardini della Biennale, Venice, until 7 November

www.labiennale.org

Photographs by Paul Raftery/VIEW except; Estwua & Japan--David Levene; Ireland--Dennis Gilbert/VIEW; Belgium--Marie-Francoise Plissart