Truman Capote once observed that 'Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go', a sentiment that might equally apply to the city's eighth Architecture Biennale, arrayed in all its customary pomp and pretension in the Castello Gardens and the great ropeworks and munitions sheds of the Arsenale. This time the press vernissage coincided with the tail end of the Venice Film Festival, so an intoxicating menage of cinematic and architectural luminaries could be spotted on assorted corniches, landing stages, restaurants and hotel lobbies. Native Venetians, who have had their fill of tired and emotional visitors (from the Queen of Cyprus and Napoleon to Byron swimming in the Grand Canal), remain admirably unmoved by such brushes with celebrity, stoically wrapping binliners around their feet to wade through the equinoxal acqua alta in St Mark's Square. (Many stars from both film and architectural firmaments still cherish the illusion that they actually can walk on water...)

In the Biennale director's chair this time was Deyan Sudjic, current editor of Domus, who kept instructions to his vast cast of architects, exhibition designers, cultural commissioners and general hangers-on simple and was rewarded with one of the more interesting and coherent shows of recent times. Sudjic's unifying theme of 'Next' had a strong whiff of branding about it (What Comes Next, Up Next, Next Generation, Next Technology, Next Places), but was essentially an attempt to track the progress of architecture over the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was also elastic and accommodating enough to sustain different interpretations and the familiar flummoxing diversity when representatives from over thirty countries, from Austria to Venezuela, are invited to make some kind of grandiose arid definitive architectural statement.