Vertigo: The Strange New World of the Contemporary City.

Edited by Rowan Moore, London: Laurence King Publishing, 1999, [pounds]30 ([pounds]19.95 at exhibition)

This is a book (and an exhibition, which closes soon) about simulation, about places pretending to be other places and the disorientation that comes 'when the certainties on which we stand are blown away'. Rowan Moore's excellent long introduction takes us on a round the world sight-seeing trip to all the most exotic and extreme examples of the phenomenon. We gawp like the tourists we've all become at the 'Venice in the desert' of Lake Las Vegas before zooming off to see the Windows on the World theme park in Shenzen, and the Las Vegas-inspired Sunway Lagoon in Kuala Lumpur - a simulation of a simulation with Malaysian flavour additives. But it isn't all theme parks, casinos and shopping malls. The skyscrapers of Shenzen itself are crude copies of originals by the likes of Foster, Pelli and Eisenman, and housing schemes like Disney's Celebration in Florida or the Prince of Wales's Poundbury estate in Dorset are simulations of real communities that may once have existed, though perhaps only as film sets.

Faced with all this architecture that isn't quite architecture, 'real' architects are put in an awkward position. How can they give lasting form to social realities when daily life is dominated by the fleeting fantasies of film, television and advertising?

According to Moore, the best architects Gehry, Ito, Koolhaas, Nouvel, Herzog and de Meuron - perform a kind of balancing act, making virtues of the qualities of this strange new world, 'its weird shifts of scale, its juxtapositions of the local and the global, the physical and the immaterial, its odd misapplications of imagery', without falling into the abyss of out and out consumerism. Perhaps this is why most of the following chapters are about real architecture - Foster's Chek Lap Kok airport, Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Herzog & de Meuron's Tate Gallery and Latz & Partner's poetic conversion of an abandoned steelworks in Duisberg to a public park. The message seems to be that we can't go on simulating for ever or we will run out of things to simulate. But will we? Hasn't architecture always been a simulation game? What is a Greek temple, after all, but a marble simulation of a wooden original? COLIN DAVIES

The exhibition runs until 16 May at The Old Fruitmarket, Albion St, Glasgow.