Take Ireland first. Usually a fringe player, this time Ireland hits the spot and most closely embraces the theme of the Biennale. Its offering is a building, an installation, a memory of hard times and savage abuse, and an object lesson in how perceptions can be turned round. Ireland displays a single project ripe with meaning, adroitly displayed as an independent work of architecture in its own right. And - a difficult thing to achieve in this jostling casbah of a show - it occupies a prominent position befitting its status. A large and noble space in the building known as the Artiglierie, at a natural break-point in the long trudge through the stupendous Arsenale buildings, has given Ireland its most prominent Biennale location yet. Commissioner Shane O'Toole has done well.

The labour of love that is the ongoing Letterfrack Furniture College in Connemara, designed by architects Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, is a transformation wrought on a number of levels. And in Venice, they have transformed it once more, into a vessel of metaphor. It is made not only as a response to the theme, but as a physical response to the ancient naval buildings in which this part of the exhibition takes place. The moment you encounter it, you know it is right.

The Letterfrack college project is not just a matter of physically changing and adding to an existing complex of buildings in a remarkable landscape, which is what the architects have done over several years, with their customary intelligence and dedication. The project is about a kind of moral cleansing as well. Letterfrack Furniture College is a thriving independent organization today, but had previously been a Christian Brothers' penal institution, a rural labour camp known as St. Joseph's Industrial School. Boys found on the streets, whether orphaned or truanting, and those convicted of minor crimes, were packed off there to live and work. The aim was that these 'waifs and strays' as the Christian Brothers called them, would acquire useful trades.