At the very moment when Ireland kicked off its World Cup campaign in Niigata against Cameroon last month, another Irish team - unnoticed at home - was holding centre stage on the far side of Japan, at Tokyo's Maison Franco-Japonaise.

Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, the outstanding Irish architects of their generation, were representing Ireland at a symposium to mark the opening of New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Japan (New Trends), an EU-Japan joint project that includes an annual symposium and exhibition in both Tokyo and the European Capital of Culture.

First held last year, when Europe's cultural capitals were Porto and Rotterdam, New Trends' origins lie in a speech made in early 2000 by Japan's Foreign Minister, Yohei Kono, which led the EU and Japan to designate the first ten years of the new millennium as a decade of mutual cooperation.

The long-term importance of promoting people-to-people exchanges as part of this process was confirmed at last month's summit meeting in Tokyo between Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister of Japan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark (President of the European Council), and Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (EC). New Trends was singled out in the summit communiqué as the first joint initiative involving the bringing together of people and cultures - one of four objectives of the action plan for cooperation drawn up between the EC and Japan.

New Trends is largely the brainchild of Eduardo Kol de Carvalho, director of the Instituto Camões and cultural counsellor of the Portuguese Embassy in Japan and trained architect, who convinced the European press and cultural counsellors group in Tokyo that architecture offered a forum where the diversity of cultures and future common challenges could be fruitfully presented and discussed.

He approached Art Front Gallery - an independent tenant of Hillside Terrace in Tokyo's ritzy Daikanyama district - with whom he had cooperated on previous international art events, to provide the project's secretariat. One of Europe's leading architecture centres, Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux, acted as the project's contact point in Europe for the second edition.

Prominent young architects - 15 from Europe and five from Japan were selected to participate in the 2001 event by a panel of three architects of world renown - Fumihiko Maki, who has spent a quarter of a century designing the Hillside Terrace complex; Europe's greatest living architect, Álvaro Siza, from Porto, for whom "the discovery of young talented architects is a motive of joy and hope in the destiny of my profession"; and Wiel Arets, the youthful dean of Rotterdam's Berlage Institute.

Over 4,000 people visited the exhibition in Tokyo and 2,000 students attended lectures by the European participants at 17 universities and cultural institutes throughout Japan. What genuinely shocked them and the Japanese architects who saw the exhibition was the extraordinary cultural diversity of the European work. Asked to sum up how it was viewed, Rei Maeda of Art Front Gallery said: "It was not what we expected. One trend in particular was clear - many of the architects were working as artists. Architecture and art had gone beyond their traditional borders."

Ireland was represented by Tom de Paor, fresh from his triumph at the 2000 Venice Biennale where N³, the Irish peat-briquette pavilion, was one of the memorable contributions. He was one of three Europeans - the others were Casagrande and Rintala from Finland and John Körmeling from the Netherlands - subsequently invited by Fram Kitagawa, President of Art Front Gallery, to carry out projects in Niigata Prefecture, for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial which opens next July.

De Paor was back in Japan two months ago to select a site. Located at the mouth of O-Sawa-Yama, a new mountain road tunnel near Tokamachi City, the small site beside a river and its tributary is covered by snow each winter to a depth of three metres. So his project for a small park with a rest stop and covered facilities for fitting and removing snow chains from tyres will be "about how snow lies." He will mould the site to form "a built landscape that feels like an object."

It is a bit harder to spot the new trends in the 2002 event. The exhibition has recently closed in Tokyo and will open next October in Salamanca, which this year shares the title of European Cultural Capital with Bruges. The Belgian city, not renowned for its support of contemporary architecture, has yet to confirm when it will host the exhibition and symposium. The exhibition's last scheduled showing is at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux, next spring.

Perhaps Cork, which will be European City of Culture in 2005, could stage the show in the new extension to Cork Public Museum in Fitzgerald's Park, with a symposium involving one or more of the young Japanese and European architects, as well as de Paor and O'Donnell and Tuomey, who are currently building in Cork. It would be a valuable priming operation for 2005.

Designed by Arc en Rêve's Michel Jacques, the 2002 exhibition is dreamily beautiful. Twenty large, colourful lanterns - some standing on metal tripods, some suspended from the ceiling - adorned the spare, calm sequence of pale spaces at Hillside. Each architect's body of work is presented as a glowing splash of colour, created by an internally illuminated cylinder of translucent images, in a floating world of its own.

But it is hard to identify the common threads - the new trends - and, through them, the curators' intentions. Some of the exhibitors are at the start of their careers, whereas others, including O'Donnell and Tuomey and Kazuyo Sejima, are well established and producing mature work.

This year's curators were Toyo Ito, designer of the Sendai Mediatheque, shortlisted for this year's World Architecture Building of the Year award; Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects, whose stunning "folded landscape" that is the monumental New International Passenger Terminal at Osanbashi in Yokohama was officially opened the day after last month's symposium in Tokyo; and Bob van Reeth, chief architect of Flanders.

New Trends is likely to become a biennial event from now on, with an advisory board of figures such as Siza, Arets, Maki, Ito and Hiroshi Hara, who will appoint the curators. "We want to make this the most inspiring exhibition internationally," says Ms Maeda. The next edition, in 2004 - when Lille will be European Capital of Culture - may be broadened to include other participants from the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia, China and Korea.

One of the hidden agendas of the project seems to be to counteract the overwhelming cultural influence, in architecture as elsewhere, of the United States. Already Australian policy is beginning to focus on Asia for cultural exchanges. Japan is looking to build partnerships with Europe, impressed by how we have apparently retained the cultural diversity of our different regions while unifying the continent in political and economic terms.

Ireland, which supported last year's event through the embassy in Tokyo as well as through the Cultural Relations Committee, was one of five EU states that provided less support this time round. Let's hope it is not another sign that we are becoming semi-detached about engaging with Europe and the rest of the world.

Postscript: March 2005 New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Asia-Pacific will have its only European showing this year at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, from June 10 until July 23, as part of the Cork 2005 celebrations. A symposium with all 20 exhibitors - 10 representing the 25 member states of the European Union, five from Japan and one each from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Korea and Malaysia - will take place in Cork on Saturday, June 11, 2005. Ireland is represented in the exhibition by Hassett Ducatez Architects. www.architecture-trend-press.net

For text reproduction rights to the article above, contact the editor of The Irish Times