It's rather like a crowded end-of-year student show of the kind Cook used to orchestrate at the Bartlett School in London, whence he retired this year to become, startlingly, a more active practising architect than at any time in his life. The best part is the entrance, where a big photo-mural of all the architects greets you, for all the world like a troupe of vaudeville entertainers headed by Cook as MC. Inside we get to see - if we squint through slots - Arad's scheme for an "Upperworld" hotel on top of London's Battersea Power Station. He also has a spiral chandelier that displays text messages you send to it. So what? Then there is Murphy's oval film house for Edinburgh, a good controversial idea for a permanent home for the Edinburgh Film Festival. And a colourful skyscraper for Berlin by Future Systems, which did not have nearly so much impact as their stainless-steel-fish of a mineral water bar in the gardens outside. And so on.

Among the national pavilions, I liked Denmark particularly this year, for the simple reason that they asked their architects to imagine impossibly ambitious projects for a Utopian future - such as using all the water they have frozen in Greenland to relieve poverty in Africa and, as a by-product, save the world from climate change. Neat.

Architects come up with all kinds of tricks to grab your attention at the Biennale. Japan fools around with Manga culture. Wilkinson Eyre project their designs onto a water surface, helped by sculptor Bill Pye. Anglo-Germans Sauerbruch Hutton score a hit with their 3D installation, viewed through proper cardboard coloured specs, that make you feel you are sitting inside a hologram of one of their buildings.

What does this Biennale overall tell us about the way architecture is now going? Away from the cities and the icons and into rurbanian make-do-and-mend, I'd say, to judge by all the projects that tackle in-between places. Germany shows the way. One immense panorama, snaking in and out of all the rooms in their pavilion, shows just such a characterless sub-everything environment - lifted slightly by lots of small-scale architectural interventions. It makes sense. We've all had it up to here with landmarks. Time to give the ordinary a bit of a twist instead.

"Metamorph", the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale, continues in Venice until November 7.
Details: www.labiennale.org/en/architecture