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From barely there buildings to ethereal cloud walks, the Venice Biennale is where architects go to dream

Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind's eye, you strip away the flamboyant gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water's edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner's reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represent the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).

Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.

The biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specialise in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal – buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible – this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year's exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren't such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.

The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale – the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy – and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes' walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, "an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited". She continued: "As an architect, I feel it's a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It's a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves."

As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.

They were, they said, "thinking of architecture in the air", whereby "even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike". I see. Or, rather, I didn't, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.

The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami's installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres – as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are "indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building". At one point, it all threatened to fall down.

Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before – notably on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio – yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapour, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminancy. Anything might go.

As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale's participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.

These installations – clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures – are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?

A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it's all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous interecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.

In recent Biennales, curators have been been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark's Square.

This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.

The Biennale's Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen's huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.

In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It's rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.

The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.

The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects' hands – young and old – drawing, made the simple point that, although it's undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.

"What makes a livable city?" ask the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it's easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.

Flower cities and giant tigers

The Finns ask us to "stay with the elements" and "close to nature"; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city centre, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centrepiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope – that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past – is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.

Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a "good" life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.

With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humourless world of "urban regeneration" and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2010. The original incorrectly described Italo Calvino as a Venetian. This has been deleted.

Originally published in the Guardian on 14 August 1991

The Prince of Wales has resigned as president of the patrons of the National Museums of Scotland in a furore reminiscent of the "monstrous carbuncle" saga, because he was not sufficiently consulted over architectural plans for the new Museum of Scotland.

Buckingham Palace said yesterday the prince had twice warned the organisation that he would relinquish the post if a competition to design the new building was not changed. The prince, who favours the neo-classical style of architecture, is thought to have wanted more public consultation on the building which will adjoin the existing museum in Edinburgh's Chambers Street.

His resignation was timed to coincide with the announcement of the winning plans and is being interpreted as a criticism of the six shortlisted entries, all of which he saw. Announcing the winner of the competition yesterday, the Marquess of Bute said the timing was "less than ideal." He added that the prince's heavy commitments had made it difficult to consult him regularly on the project.

The prince served as the patrons' president for 18 months. A persistent critic of modern architects, he complained in 1984 that plans for a new extension to the National Gallery looked like a "monstrous carbucle on the face of an elegant and much loved friend." Three months later they were dropped.

Dr Sheila Brock, director of public relations, said: "The prince obviously felt he didn't have the opportunity to comment all the way through. I wouldn't say I am surprised and we are not fazed by it."

The competition for the contract attracted 371 entries. The prince is unlikely to approve of the winning design by the Scottish architect Gordon Benson and the Newcastle-born Alan Forsyth. Unlike the new Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery designed to blend into its environment and of which the prince approves, the £25 million building will stand out in the sombre Chambers Street as one of the city's most innovative and modern.

To be built in stone, it looks like an industrial factory, with windows resembling gunports and a turret half way up. It will prove a direct contrast with the existing museum, a quasi-classical construction built last century. The building will display many Scottish objects now in storage and is due to open in 1996.

Joanna Coles

These archive extracts are compiled by members of the Guardian's research and information department. Email: research.department@guardian.co.uk

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Andrew Dickson takes an exclusive first tour around the newly restored Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and finds a transformation taking place behind the scenes

Jonathan Glancey talks to the French architect Jean Nouvel about his design for this year's Serpentine pavilion

Award-winning architect Jean Nouvel has finally built in Britain. He tells Jonathan Glancey why he created a 'sun machine' in a London park (complete with ping-pong tables)

Jean Nouvel stands before his first British building, a striking all-red structure set amid the sun-baked greenery of Kensington Gardens in London, and says: "You walk past the park. You look. You catch the red between the trees. What is it? Sails? A circus? Something. You don't know what, so you have to look."

The French architect is talking about the summer pavilion he has created for the Serpentine Gallery, which was unveiled yesterday. What inspired this rhapsody in red? "It was that moment," he says, "when the summer sun catches you full in the eyes and, as you blink, the world dissolves into red."

Nouvel's pavilion – the 10th to grace this park – isn't just red on the outside, though. Beneath its commanding red steel frame and retractable red canvas awnings, there's a red rubber floor, around which are dotted red table tennis tables, red hammocks, red tables and chairs, and red chess sets. Even the auditorium and cafe bar are red (as are its fridges). And, just in case you had any difficulty spotting the pavilion from a distance, off to the side there is a 12-metre red glass wall, sprouting up from the grass like a great big punctuation mark.

This "big sunglass", as Nouvel calls it, leans over at an unsettling angle, appearing to threaten the pavilion, adding a sense of drama, even danger, to his eye-catching creation. "In one way," says Nouvel, "the pavilion is a sun machine, a way of directing sunlight. In another, it is a fragile flower that rises in the park in the summer sun, wilts in the autumn, and then vanishes. Of course, red is also the colour of London in some ways – the buses, the pillar boxes, the soldiers for the Queen – but mostly red is about the sun."

But Nouvel, who follows in the footsteps of previous Serpentine architects Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas, wants the pavilion to do more than just catch the sun. "I want it to catch and filter emotions, to be a little place of warmth and delight. For an architect, it's always a pleasure to work with a programme that has no great consequences – the pavilion comes, the pavilion goes. It leaves an impression, echoes of emotion, nothing more. In this way, the architect is free to be the artist. This is not a perfect exercise in architecture. It's a building from a dream that allows us to have some little, I hope happy, sensations. It's architecture on holiday."

Nouvel's pavilion is a simple yet striking construction that, on closer inspection, proves to be far more than a brightly coloured sculpture. Some of its red surfaces absorb light, others reflect it; some glimmer, others are translucent. Beneath its retractable roofs hang photographs of another grand park in a great capital city: Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg – but that's a formal park, like most of France's, unlike the more relaxed and playful English ones. These shots are by Jean Baudrillard, the celebrated French philosopher who died three years ago; he was a big influence on Nouvel, as well as a friend. Through this pavilion, architect and philosopher walk together again in a vibrant green space.

The structure has clearly been shaped, with a little help from Arup engineers led by David Glover and Cecil Balmond, as a plaything. Yes, there will be serious talks and various events in the auditorium. But before people go along to these, they can meet and chat in the red bar – or play red table-tennis, or kick a red football or hurl a red Frisbee out into the park. So, what's with all this playfulness?

Well, the Serpentine pavilion is traditionally designed by an architect who has yet to build, or complete, a building in Britain. The 2010 pavilion, however, is only just ahead of the game: this autumn sees the opening of  Nouvel's One New Change, a controversial shopping and office complex to the east of St Paul's Cathedral. This is serious architecture, about as playful as a nuclear reactor. Nouvel himself has described the building as a "stealth bomber": although enormous, it is clad in non-reflective (or opaque) glass, as if to disguise its bulk. Prince Charles tried to scupper Nouvel's chances here, but failed to get his own preferred architects appointed. The pavilion, in toying with architecture, provides a bit of balance against what is to come.

It seems a shame that Nouvel's first major permanent work in Britain is a commercial behemoth. His strength lies in the design of art galleries, concert halls and museums. The energetic 64-year- old's best works are the Institut du Monde Arabe, a mesmerising cultural foundation by the Seine in Paris, completed in 1987; 1994's Fondation Cartier, a quietly beautiful Parisian arts centre that reveals itself through layers of huge glass screens; and last year's Copenhagen Concert Hall, a mesh cube lit up at night to dazzling effect. Each of these finely wrought and enigmatic buildings was expressed in one overriding colour: silver, white, blue.

"Architecture is a dialogue," says Nouvel. "When it's complete, I hope you will see some of the ways we've incorporated games into One New Change. There will be a terrace with new views of the City and St Paul's – and it won't have that transparent glass look you get with 99% of city buildings, which makes everywhere seem nowhere." Is it possible to take ideas from art galleries and pavilions and use them in big commercial buildings? "If it's desirable, then it's possible. Architects have to offer a window into the future, even when the window won't open."

Nouvel's best commercial designs have been the soaring, 38-storey Torre Agbar in Barcelona, a Catalan cousin of Norman Foster's Gherkin (completed in the same year the Gherkin opened, 2004, but with a mosaic effect rather than a diamond one); his (sadly unbuilt) Tour Sans Fins proposal, an ethereal, pencil-thin 1,300ft skyscraper that would have vanished into the skies above Paris's La Défense office complex; and the Hotel in Lucerne, opened a decade ago and showing again Nouvel's obsession with immersing users of his buildings in intense colour, this time black.

I once stayed at the Hotel: it was like being Jean Nouvel for a few days, such was the insight it gave into his style, which began to feel like a philosophy. My suite – pitch black at one end, pure white at the other, where it opened into an unexpected bamboo garden – was reached along a jet-black corridor that rendered day and night indistinguishable. The topsy-turvy atmosphere was heightened by a concealed projector throwing a scene from Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire across the bedroom ceiling. The same scene played over and over and I couldn't turn it off. It was dreamlike, unforgettable and, to be honest, somewhat maddening.

Nouvel is very good when working with art, artists and imaginative concepts. Both of his major arts projects are now in the Middle East: the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the National Museum of Qatar. Both are caravanserai-like attempts to find a design that responds to the desert landscape, and both are set above water gardens. "These seem to be early days for European architects working in the Middle East," he says. "We have to do better than we have before. We must find ways of helping to shape a true Arabian architecture, not just put ready-made, inappropriate designs down in the desert."

Nouvel is an architect with plenty of jokers up the sleeves of his trademark jet-black suits. But his ideas can be as romantic as they are philosophical: the Tour Sans Fins proposals showed how even the most matter-of-fact building type (in this case the office block) could be a work of poetic imagination, finesse and structural daring. As the sun beats down on his scarlet pavilion, it is hard not to think of Nouvel as an optimist, too, one with a very unFrench view of the British weather. He has certainly been lucky to unveil his "sun machine" in the middle of a heatwave. He could so easily have found himself explaining its inspiration from beneath a rain-battered red umbrella, as the world dissolved into grey.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion is open to the public from 10 July until 17 October.

The French architect Jean Nouvel's Serpentine gallery pavilion was unveiled this morning. Here's a first look around the temporary structure