The Oscars of architecture

`Nessun oggetto e innocente," says the slogan in blue neon capital letters at the San Toma vaporetto landing stage on the Canal Grande. "No object is innocent" - but then neither are the organisers of the seventh Architectural Biennale in Venice.

Its theme is "The City: Less Aesthetics More Ethics", a slogan dreamt up by the Italian architect, Massimiliano Fuksas, who is directing the show. His version of "less is more" is also spelled out in blue neon in this "luminous path" of 12 texts, which is oddly reminiscent of the Ulysses neon texts by Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones which were the Nissan public art project in Dublin in 1997.

According to Fuksas, the slogan is not intended as an "irrefutable affirmation", but rather a quest to broaden the dialogue between architects and the general public - especially now when cities around the world are exploding and architects must come to terms with urban strife, despair and the plight of refugees.

It also aims to "pick up the thread that was broken at the end of the 1970s - the great heritage of research, ideas and utopias produced by the 1960s". This may be seen as an attack on postmodernism, which was given such a boost at the first Architectural Biennale in 1980 when Aldo Rossi floated his Teatro del Mondo into the Venetian lagoon.

Inevitably, the Biennale is a cacaphonous fiesta, more usually of art than architecture, with everyone competing for attention. Its awards ceremony, held last Saturday, is like an architects' Oscars, with any number of architectural stars wandering around the main site; all that's missing in car-free Venice are vulgar white stretch limos.

Many of the participating countries have made an effort to respond to the Biennale's theme, notably the Czechs and Slovaks who still share an old pavilion in the Giardini di Castello, despite their political divorce. Accompanied by the unsettling music from Twin Peaks, they are telling some very unaesthetic stories about tower blocks and racism.

Globalisation - "all the trash in a single word", as a polemical Czech tract puts it - is another recurrent preoccupation of exhibitors in Venice; it is wittily summed up by two American architects in their "Interclone Hotel" slide show (same room everywhere, with "ethnic" touches) and a marvellous video that melts all the big brand logos.

So, too, is information technology. Hani Rashid, a New York architect known for his experimental installations and computer-generated environments, is showing a walk-in "big red lady bug" housing digital cameras which take snaps every 30 seconds; by the end of the Biennale, he estimates that there will be 1.5 million images. But for what?

The Swiss pavilion, entered by climbing an aluminium staircase over the wall of the Giardini, must be some sort of post-modern pun because all it contains are white walls scrawled with racially-offensive graffiti in several languages, with half-a-dozen half-crocked cars outside and a loudspeaker blaring out largely incomprehensible messages.

Much more serious is the Austrian pavilion, which has been declared an "Area of Tolerance" for freedom of expression and against racism or xenophobia. Featuring the work of foreign architects in Austria, it even invites visitors to comment on the current political situation there, following the far Right's involvement in the government.

The Dutch are much more playful. They have turned their pavilion, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1954, into the "NL Lounge", a carpeted public livingroom with recliners built into the floor, TV screens, zappers, books, computers and other diversions, where visitors are invited to "engage in spontaneous acts of mutual understanding".

The idea is to explore how technology is blurring the distinctions between public and private space in the city, because the "livingroom" is designed to be simultaneously comfortable and alienating. Those who are not willing to "de-fence" are filtered out from the start by a requirement to remove one's shoes. On architecture critics, compared to music critics, it says: "Instead of sharing a room with Madonna, you get some middle-aged guy, wearing Yamamoto or Prada, lisping or spluttering in your ear about how his work is all about geishas or virtual reality or philosophy when in actual fact he's talking about a pharmacy or a f***ing office building."

The Israelis have tackled the same theme in a different way with an engaging exhibition entitled Intimate Anonymity in their small, all-white pavilion built in the 1970s. It features a 360-degree projection in a white curtained room, mainly showing people in public places; gradually, the people inside gradually realise that that they are part of it. The French, meanwhile, have abandoned their villa-like pavilion - "the symbol of institutional power" - leaving only slogans on the wall directing visitors to the real event, which is a series of open discourses on board a vaporetto. It will "take on the complexion of its guests" as they cruise around the lagoon and canals of Venice, debating the issues.

In the British pavilion, another old villa, work by four architects includes Nigel Coates's deranged vision of Ecstacity, with street plans mapped over an imaginary landscape derived from the naked forms of male and female bodies; its possible "interfaces" are given as "tuning in, locking on, undressing, letting go, cranking up and flipping out".

The modernist Japanese pavilion has been transformed into what is billed as a City of Girls. Everything is virginal white - walls, marble gravel, even the tree trunks outside. There are artificial daisies everywhere, photographs of Japanese girls on the verge of puberty and colourful elephant head-shaped creations in fabric for their protection.

The Finns, in their own rather disappointing pavilion designed by Alvar Aalto, are showing very impressive concrete churches, factories and other buildings by Aarno Ruusuvuori, mainly from the 1960s, including a magnificent model of one of his churches. In the German pavilion, the exhibition is given over entirely to the construction, destruction and reconstruction of Berlin. This is illustrated by a series of maps of the central area over the past century, but it manages to be quite disingenuous in not conceding the awful truth that most of the destruction post-dated the second World War.

As for the awards, the coveted Leone d'Oro (Golden Lion) for the best interpretation of the exhibition theme went to the French architect, Jean Nouvel, for "the extraordinary versatility and poetic creativity of his architectural and urban projects", which range from the Arab Institute in Paris to the Concert Hall in Lausanne with its amazing steel canopy.

Golden Lions for lifetime achievement in architecture were awarded to Renzo Piano, who made his name with the Pompidou Centre in Paris; Paolo Soleri, who emigrated to the US from his native Turin in 1955 to work with Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona, and Utzon, the Danish architect who designed that 20th century icon, the Sydney Opera House.

The award for the best foreign pavilion went to Spain for a beautifully lit presentation of architectural models and drawings, suspended from the ceiling in all-black spaces beyond a shocking red entrance hall. The international jury gave it the prize "because it expresses the cultural roots of its architecture with elegance and clarity".

And yet, the Spanish pavilion was all about aesthetics, rather than ethics, style rather than substance. The fact that it was given the prize reinforced Irish architect Tom de Paor's barbed view that if you take the first letter of each word of the Biennale's slogan, it forms the acronym LAME.

The Venice Biennale of Architecture runs until October 29th. Admission to the event is 25,000 Italian lire (about £10). Further information online at www.labiennale.org