View from Malmo.

With the completion of the Bridge, Malmo in southern Sweden has become a critical link point between northern Scandinavia. To celebrate, it launched a housing exhibition intended to suggest what a civilized society will look like in future. Results are mixed, with a good basic plan, dull or overstretched buildings, yet excellent landscape.

Sweden has an admirable record of mounting regular housing exhibitions - the built sort, not dreary product shows in eye-dulling, nose-stuffing exhibition halls, but permanent buildings put up to show what the future might be like as the German Werkbund did in the early decades of the twentieth century. The last notable Swedish one was at Helsingborg (AR February 2000). The latest is in Malmo, the southern town which is just across the Sound from Copenhagen, to which it is now linked by the much publicized Oresund bridge. The bridge is perhaps a triumph of engineering logistics and a vital element in the European transport system, linking the virtual island of Norway and Sweden to the continental south by rail and road. But it is powerfully boring. No one can call it beautiful (cable stayed bridges cannot possibly compare in elegance to the apparently discredited suspension kind). And it has no proper sense of departure or arrival, for it starts in a tunnel on the Danish side and almost imperceptibly becomes airborne after emerging from a concrete gutter. For travellers by train, there is so much diagonally repetitive structure that the view is obscured and the flashing struts cause queasiness. Up on the road, barriers prevent car travellers seeing the Sound, so only people in lorries and busses can appreciate the dramatic journey. The height of the barriers can't be established for safety's sake, to prevent people becoming disorientated by the view and careering over the edge - else why are they not raised much higher to prevent drivers of commercial vehicles becoming distracted? The design has the kind of contemporary civil engineering indifference to humans dramatically shown in the difference between the old Severn bridge between England and Wales (suspension, elegant, with marvellous views) and the new one (cable stayed, coarse, no views, but said to be efficient).

When you finally get to Malmo Central (Scandinavian trains are excellently clean and decently designed, but often seem to run late), you come into the edge of a cheerful little city. Its squares and streets were laid out in the seventeenth century, and adapted harmoniously in different kinds of architecture until at least the 1970s, after which indifferent, scaleless commercial Modernism took over. The coarseness of late twentieth-century building is a shock against a background texture which varies from almost Gothic Danish brick to fanciful National Romantic and even austere early Modern but has a degree of common scale.

Clumsiness and lack of almost everything but functional efficiency was stamped on Swedish architecture in the '70s by a ghastly alliance between big contracting business and bureaucracy. Sweden, having been a wonderful inspiration to the world from the '40s to the '60s, suffered terribly - it was first to be infected by the bacillus of the managero-mediocrity now beginning to infect all European architecture. Only a few Swedes (Ralph Erskine to the front) kept any notion of architecture alive in the dark days.

Now, things are changing. Some architects have managed to buck the system to produce (in Swedish terms) adventurous and individualistic work. So I hoped Bo01 (Living '01) would bc lively and innovative. And it was, in a way, though it's not entirely easy to get to, for it's on redundant industrial dockland, and the road is long and dreary, flanked by cleared sites or boring new commercial muck.

Basic planning is sensible, with a wall of housing looking over the Sound to protect the inner part from winds that drive here as fiercely as they do down the Bosporous. Within the wall are lower, small-scale housing courts, a park, and a suggestion that a notion of complex social structure might perhaps evolve. Though much is unfinished, the best bit is: landscaping makes up for many defects. The site was polluted by industrial indifference, and the first move made by the organizers was to plant vast quantities of willow (salix). Sticks, just pushed into thc sandy made-up soil, have flourished and are now an almost solid mass 3 or 4m high. It is expected to suck up poisons from the soil, and will (sadly) be replaced by buildings. Into the dense green forest are carved small spaces, what the organizers call 'secret gardens', each a particular comment on place, from people like Martha Schwartz, Adriaan Geuze and Andersson & Kragh.

Most of the buildings are not much more than mediocre. Driven mainly by contractors' values, apartment strips are neat enough but dull. Flats are small and intended to be very expensive (though of course from the best sites, there are fine views over the Sound, and you have to pay for sea and sky). Even Erskine's block lacks flair, having doubtless been processed through some form of design and build contract. Gert Wingardh (rising hope of Swedish architecture) has made an inventive series of housing types to form one of the courts, but they are colossally dear.

Kockums cock-up

The organizers decided to make the whole place into an advertisement for Malmo by commissioning a landmark apartment tower by Santiago Calatrava. He has produced an absurd proposal (the Twisting Torso). It writhes as it rises with an extravagant muscular geometry that gives no apparent benefit to future inhabitants, nor clear structural advantage. It evidently adds to the architect's private scrapbook of engineering sculptures, perhaps dramatically appropriate for stations and bridges, hut clumsy, to say the least, when used in the more tender scale of dwelling.

Calatrava's tower seems the more absurd because it is to be close to the mighty gantry crane of the defunct Kockums shipyard. This awesomely vast grey machine was, from the '60s, a great and welcoming symbolic portal to Malmo. Now, it is to be demolished because it is said to be expensive to maintain. The world's biggest, it was the finest example of Swedish engineering of its age, and a symbol of the little city, visible from Copenhagen and many miles up and down the Sound.

Malmo doesn't need Calatrava's flats, which will undoubtedly be more expensive than anything else in the whole area, and could he put up anywhere foolish enough to pay for them. Work on the tower has not yet started. Instead, the city fathers should restore the unique crane, and give Malmo its history back.