In 2006 the Venice Biennale, the world's most important architecture festival, was curated by Ricky Burdett of the London School of Economics on the theme of cities.
It blasted the visitor with a barrage of shocking statistics and a cocktail of urban grit, grain and growth.
It was a brave, if not entirely successful, attempt to inject some real life into what had become a self-congratulatory celebration of sculptural form, skyscrapers and expensive museums.
This year, under the roving international architecture curator Aaron Betsky, if the title betrays a certain surfer-dude dumbness (Out There), the subtitle (Architecture Beyond Building) confirms that this is the year of the avant-garde slacker-hippy, the digital drawing dude who can't be bothered to make a building in the real world with its contingent difficulties and sociopolitical implications.
But Betsky has brought the shape-making back with a bang.
Venice 2008 is a disconcerting blend of catwalk and art fair, muscling in on the large-scale and pseudo-architectural installations of the Art Biennale with which it alternates.
The theatrically dark, decaying halls show a range of digitally generated swirls, shiny folded surfaces, complex parametric constructions and Plexiglas furniture: sci-fi future as design showroom.
The main show, the installations at the Arsenale, represent a dated version of tomorrow, of architecture as an extension of the digital realm, cyberspace, not existential space.
It almost seems as if architects have allowed themselves to be seduced by the technology of a military-industrial complex against which their predecessors in 1968 (who produced almost identical designs working entirely with their imaginations rather than this awesome processing power) were rebelling.
By leaving the generation of complex, multi-layered and sensuously sculptural digital forms to processors and programmes, architects seem to feel they are able to create forms that are beyond criticism because their creation has been delegated to binary systems.
Responsibility is transferred to the machine and backed up with badly written manifestos in a huge and toe-curlingly bodged catalogue.
Notwithstanding a few good things, including Frank Gehry's weirdly cracked-clay-clad Babylonian tower (Gehry was uncontroversially awarded this year's Golden Lion), the Arsenale is missable. So what of the national pavilions, the traditional pick 'n' mix?
They span, as usual, the reflective and intellectual and the pretentious and awesomely dull.
France and the United States stand out for not standing out. Others are subtly convincing or genuinely moving.
The best by far is the sly wit of the Estonians, who have simply laid a massive yellow pipeline between the Russian and German pavilions.
A bitterly funny comment on the planned gas pipeline which will in reality run between those two countries via Estonian waters, the lurid installation messes up the romantic, sylvan promenade between pavilions.
This is agit-prop aesthetics at its deadpan best.
Russia and Germany (both apparently livid at Estonia's cheek) respond with good stuff of their own.
The Russians built theirs on a basement of natural forms crafted, Andy Goldsworthy-like, into pantheistic temples, a dark forest of the imagination defined by dense timber and deep snow.
Upstairs, a ghastly collection of towering oligarchitecture crushes the natural world below. I hope it is tongue-in-cheek.
The Germans comment on the environmental crisis with a vast, Calder-like installation of eco-trappings and a sinister orchard of lush, fruit-bearing apple trees grown in measly pots and nourished by sickly green IV drip-feeds.
The Czechs and Slovaks, bound together in their inter-war pavilion (no one gets new pavilions), have a poignant display of fridges, each illustrating the contents of a different class or income group.
From the bottles of drinks and a nasty-looking piece of meat to the champagne and caviar of the prosperous, this is painfully sharp social comment.
The Japanese pavilion, with its minimal pencil graffito walls and delicate, glass-encased landscapes, seemed popular, while the exhibition on the architect Sverre Fehn in the beautiful Nordic pavilion he designed in 1962 is a cooling breath of mountain air.
Finally the British pavilion. I must declare an interest here: I was on the panel that recommended both theme and curator (the critic Ellis Woodman) and could not myself have chosen a more coherent selection of serious architects (Tony Fretton, Sergison Bates, Witherford Watson Mann, dRMM, Maccreanor Lavington) but I do have one beef. Although it is officially the duty of a national pavilion to promote, there is in Britain too much to criticise.
This exquisite exhibition is too gentle, too kind. It is critical but this is the smallest sliver of contemporary British architecture.
Yet this, the one pavilion that ignores the curator's call to ignore buildings, is arguably the most successful.
If Britain provided a welcome corner that didn't go beyond building, the Scottish secession made waves beyond the exhibition.
Cannily erecting a stepped podium, Gathering Space, opposite Venice's railway station, the Scots have pushed architecture into the public realm with a shelter-and-stairway that responds beautifully to the gently arcing steps of the new Santiago Calatrava bridge, only the fourth bridge to span the Grand Canal and a new urban intervention.
Overall, curator Betsky has been clever enough to counteract the criticism of the impotence of exhibiting architecture and has turned to the art world of installations to generate a more immediate medium.
But the work here is too familiar, the avant-garde too old-fashioned, and its effect is paradoxically to make the few depictions of the genuinely physical and haptic more seductive. It is not a failure but it tells us little that is new.
Architects are practised at creating manifestos and filmic utopias; the problem perhaps was never one of taking architecture beyond building but rather of turning into architecture the buildings we will spend our lives in.
Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, is on until November 23. Log on to www.labiennale.org for more details.
