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Two of Vancouver's finest young designers of houses are representing Canada at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Opening today, Bill Pechet and Stephanie Robb's installation there is entitled Sweaterlodge, and seems at first not to be about houses — not even about architecture.

Over the past decade, their firm has designed finely inventive custom houses for Victoria's Uplands and Vancouver's Southlands, while Robb's own Lakewood residence is the most interesting architectural transformation of a 'Vancouver Special' duplex, ever.

No images of Pechet + Robb Studio's houses or other completed buildings are on show in this, the world's premiere architectural exhibition, even though many of their international colleagues have installed hard-sell pavilions-as-portfolios. There is nothing here to distract from Sweaterlodge itself, a 50-foot-high orange polar fleece sweater hung from the rafters of Canada's quirky permanent pavilion on the Venice Biennale grounds.

Complete with over-scaled zippers and pockets, their showpiece's heart is, yes, a Brobdingnagian polar fleece sweater — its fuzzy fibres manufactured from the recycling of several thousand plastic pop containers.

Fuzziness and fluffiness are design obsessions with Pechet + Robb — their firm's website uses photos of mounds of colour-coded Kraft Miniature Marshmallows as a visual cue for site navigation: follow the green ones for their buildings; pink ones for their public art installations around the Lower Mainland; yellow ones for their stage designs for Ballet B.C. and other companies, and so on. Of his enduring design partnership with Stephanie Robb, Bill Pechet says "one of the things that has kept us together is our shared sense of humour."

With the huge sweater lodged within it, there is a kind of orange marshmallow glow inside the Canadian pavilion because of sunlight passing through skylights and the suspended sweater, which functions as a kind of temporary building-within-building. Mid-pavilion, visitors can hop on three stationary exercise bikes, their exertions generating power to project whimsical new videos about Vancouver and its outdoor-aerobic obsessions. "We wanted to portray Vancouver's youthful and energetic quality. The clichés Europeans have about Canada are pretty true," says Mr. Pechet.

Exhibition co-curator and Mr. Pechet's former boss at the University of British Columbia's architecture school, Chris MacDonald, describes Sweaterlodge in his catalogue essay as "recycled plastic drink containers rendered at the monumental scale of a titan's pullover, transformed again into a comforting interior evoking Barbarella, while reminding us of architecture's affiliation with the essential shelter of clothing."