As for the Brits, as usual they are all over: in the vast boarding-house of the Italian Pavilion, in the sprawling 17th century complex of the Arsenale, all over the place. Adjaye, Alsop, Arad, Chipperfield, Foster, Grimshaw, Hadid, Hopkins, Rogers, Wilkinson Eyre, you name them, they're out there somewhere. Often in more than one place. Our colonizing habits die hard. But there is one man whose influence is becoming all-pervasive. He's a retired academic and late-developing architect called Peter Cook.

Cook, one of the founders of the legendary 1960s Archigram Group with its plug-in, inflatable, mobile, anti-permanency manifesto, is having a whale of a time. He curates the British Pavilion this time round on behalf of the well-up-for-it British Council. He has approached this task by getting designer Morag Myerscough to plaster the Edwardian façade with an eyeball-searing plastic Pop mural, and then throwing nine utterly different Britarchitects into it to fight like ferrets in a sack. No false modesty: one of these architects is himself.

But Cook has become a guru to the world. His distinctive face with its round Corbusier spectacles - the ultimate architectural talking head - pops up also in the French Pavilion, the Israeli pavilion, quite possibly every other building in the show if I had the time to sit through all the endlessly-playing videos. It's all part of the Venetian arts game: put yourself about. Cook and the Britpack ignore the Metamorphosis theme, perhaps on the grounds that any building or plan is by its very nature a transformation of something or other. Calling the British offering "Nine Positions", Cook has rounded up Ian Ritchie (lyrical high-tech) Kathryn Findlay (sculptural-organic) Ron Arad (prefab enthusiast) John Pawson (ultra-minimalist) Richard Murphy (modern Arts and Crafts) C.J Lim (story-telling draughtsman) Future Systems (Dan Dare architecture) Caruso St. John (humane functionalism) and of course Peter Cook (here working with Gavin Robotham on a theoretical building-free East London eco-project).