With its customary provocative mixture of architecture, exhibitions, events and installations, the 7th Architecture Biennale recently opened in Venice.

With its atmosphere of hysterical, carnival transience the 7th Architecture Biennale seems curiously well matched to Venice, a great floating stageset full of dreams and desires. 'Very picturesque -- general effect fine -- individual things not' Herbert Spencer wrote of La Serenissima in 1880. Although Spencer had never set foot in the Giardini di Castello in June in Biennale year, his observation is pithily appropriate. For unassuming visitors, the Biennale is a distilled version of the city itself; a calculated assault on the senses, frustrating, inspiring, garish, frivolous and poignant in equal measure.

Under the directorship of Massimiliano Fuksas, this year's theme was 'Cities: Less Aesthetics, More Ethics', a well-intentioned attempt at exploring architectural responses to the increasingly terrifying dislocation and disorder of the urban condition. Inevitably, how this weighty theme was interpreted in both the core of the show (this year transposed to the Arsenale) and individual country exhibitions varied enormously, from the whimsical to the abstruse. Outwith the familiar confines of the Giardini and its assorted national pavilions, the main Biennale installations colonized parts of the Arsenale, Venice's mighty shipyard city that at its sixteenth-century height could turn out an entire galley in a day. The heroic industrial structures of its docks, warehouses and roperies are gradually being restored by the Biennale to create vast spaces for cultural events.

Dominating proceedings on his part of the site was a huge 280m long video wall in the Corderie (former rope workshop) which set the scene for musings on urban dislocation and anomie, with scrambled and disorientating footage of the world's megacitics from Calcutta to Las Vegas, interspersed with the thoughts of superstar architects. Unquestionably overwhelming, but ultimately somehow unfulfilling, such big and obviously theatrical gestures form part of a strategy to precipitate the Architecture Biennale beyond its relatively narrow core audience and attract wider public interest. Accompanying the massive video wall was a daunting sm[ddot{o}]rg[dot{a}]sbord of the work of 90 architects arranged in the Corderie and its sister Artiglierie. A special subsidiary exhibition on the work of Jean Prouv[acute{e}], whose projects for refugee housing still embody a powerful social and historical resonance, was a welcome distraction from the acreage of contemporary gloss. Elsewhere in the Arsenale, Finnish partnership Ca sagrande & Rintala (winners of an ar + d award for their extraordinary 'walking huts', AR December 1999) installed a witty floating garden on an abandoned cargo ship moored in the docks, creating a new public park for Venice.

Back in the Giardini, the usual perplexing diversity of spectacle prevailed in the national pavilions, with videos, computer screens and animations supplanting conventional drawings, models and photographs as a means of disseminating buildings and ideas. One of the more convincing and seductive applications of digital fetishism was Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid's architectural laboratories in the United States Pavilion, a series of works in progress by students from UCLA and Columbia University which explore spatial configurations and buildings that go beyond conventional geometric definitions. Projects will be developed over the first month of the Biennale in a series of workshops and the final submissions will remain on show for its duration.

Embracing a more traditional means of representation, two Finnish exhibitions were particularly notable for their cultivated sense of dignity and subtlety. In the Finnish Pavilion, a retrospective of the work of Aarno Ruusuvuori was structured around exquisite black and white photographs and models. Space, light and materiality were brought together in a brilliantly orchestrated synthesis of architecture's essential elements. In the Nordic Pavilion (originally designed by Sverre Fehn), which Finland shares with Sweden and Norway, Juha Ilonen's evocative photographic essay on Helsinki documented the inner courtyards of city blocks, charting the authentic realities of urban life and decay in a poetic yet unaffected way.

The combined Czech and Slovak Pavilion was another that stood out for its intelligence and rigour, examining the consequences of social marginality, political change and natural disasters. Each of the pavilion walls contained a single huge and striking newspaper image: catastrophic flooding in Central Europe, walls being constructed to separate Romany communities from 'respectable' society. For Brazil, the socially-minded work of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Jo[tilde{a}]o Filgueiras Lima was another salutary riposte to the exelusivist tendency of much contemporary architecture, showing through a series of infrastructural and urban projects how architecture can be used to transform human life for the better, despite often apparently insurmountable odds.

By contrast, the British Pavilion featured a familiar trio of ageing enfants terribles (Hadid, Coates and Alsop), plus odd-man-out David Chipperfield, whose beautifully refined models of his schemes for Salerno Palace of Justice and the Davenport Museum of Art in Iowa restored a sense of propriety among the kaleidoscopic flotsam and premeditated irreverence. Chipperfield is currently developing his competition-winning proposal (AR October 1998) to extend Venice's San Michele cemetery.

For Japan, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa created a starkly minimal interior of white walls and white gravel, which extended to the exterior, with the slim trunks of the surrounding trees carefully wrapped in white paper. Inside, colour prints of Japanese girls shot by Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene explored the pavilion's consciously tantalizing theme 'City of Girls', alluding to that peculiarly Japanese combination of toughness and kitsch characteristic of both the girls themselves and the cities they inhabit.

Not all the national exhibitions were on the Giardini site; a handful of enterprising countries held shows at various venues through the city. A straightforward trawl of current Argentine architecture curated by Jorge Glusberg found itself in the inspired setting of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Foundation. One of the more memorable offsite installations was made by Tom de Paor for Ireland. Composed entirely of bales of standard peat briquettes, N3 is a compact temporary pavilion based on the form of the letter N. Oriented north, it forms an inhabitable north point, a tripartite structure containing three linked internal chambers. The N also symbolizes San Nicolo, the beloved Venetian saint and patron of apothecaries, children, virgins and pawnbrokers, whose remains lie in the three-naved church of San Nicolo di Lido. Exploring a series of serendipitous connections, De Paor's modest yet meticulously constructed pavilion imaginatively links myth and history, art and architecture, territory and the commodificatio n of ground, Ireland and Venice.