The line between cutting-edge architecture and performance or installation art is not always clear. To what category does a building constructed out of empty wine bottles — stacked by a robot over a period of 10 years — belong? Or a tent-house, erected with energy harnessed from a Thai water buffalo? Architecture or punch line?

These projects –– only the latter of which came to fruition –– are part of an exhibition at the Frederieke Taylor gallery in Chelsea focusing on five architecture firms from New York, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Ljubljana, Slovenia. While some of the designs may seem outré, the architects, all relatively young, are already stars in their field. Some have work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Each one, Ms. Taylor said, has the potential to someday be one of architecture’s superstars.

The exhibit is called P.A.N. (Progressive Architecture Network), although the network is informal. The lead organizer is a New York architect, Winka Dubbeldam, who had a solo show at Ms. Taylor’s gallery in 2002. Ms. Taylor, one of the few gallerists in Chelsea who exhibits architecture, later asked Ms. Dubbeldam for another project. Her suggestion was a group show of forward-thinking architects she knew through an annual conference in Orléans, France. Included in the exhibit is Ms. Dubbeldam’s firm, Archi-Tectonics, as well as Jürgen Mayer of Berlin, Sadar Vuga Arhitekti of Ljubljana, R&Sie(n) of Paris, and IaN+ of Rome.(“They have such impossible names,” Ms. Taylor said good-naturedly, as she struggled to pronounce the last of these.)

The firms share an avant-garde sensibility and an adept use of technology. François Roche, the primary architect in R&Sie(n) — and the creator of both the wine-bottle building and the water-buffalo tent built for a Thai artist — may be the most far out of all of them, but Ms. Taylor suggests he has potential to receive major commissions. “This is very much like the phase that Rem Koolhaas went through [as a young architect] ––making drawings, critiquing other architects’ practices,” she said. “I could easily see him coming out of that and building a huge complex in Beijing.”

Mr. Mayer from Berlin, who has several models and drawings in MoMA’s collection, contributed one of the most beautiful models to the show: It is a model of a town hall he built in Germany –– a delicate design that hovers like a rectilinear snowflake in the center of a glass cube. According to Ms. Taylor, the design was burned or scratched into the glass with lasers.

Ms. Dubbeldam has attracted much attention in New York, most recently for a glass condominium that she designed (and where she now lives) on Greenwich street, in trendy far west SoHo. The building incorporates a 19thcentury warehouse, creating a dramatic but harmonious contrast between the brick warehouse and the wavy glass façade of the new construction.

Much of Ms. Dubbeldam’s work involves putting various elements into loose juxtaposition, without formal or conventional connections. For a house she designed in upstate New York, photographs of which are in the exhibit, she placed what she calls the “hyperactive functions” –– cooking, heating, cooling, bathing –– in one central unit, so that the rest of the house can be large, open spaces. The house also has no hallways. “The house was a pretty simple budget –– it couldn’t be too big,” Ms. Dubbeldam explained. “One way to optimize it was to eliminate hallways, which are a total waste of space.” In other words, what began as a budget constraint became a critique of an architectural convention.

What kind of relationship do the firms in P.A.N. share? Ms. Dubbeldam has a lot to say in the exhibition catalog about “scale-free networks,” which she defines as networks “that obey a power-law distribution in the number of connections between nodes on the network.” At any rate, the architects like exchanging ideas and being inspired by one another. The only official joint project for the moment is this exhibit, which will travel to the other four cities represented, with each firm finding the location and doing the planning in its hometown.

Asked if some of the wilder designs in the exhibit are more art than architecture, Ms. Dubbeldam responded immediately. “No, everyone who is there designed everything with the pure intention to build it,” she said. “There might be ones which are more futurisitic or more avant-garde or based on an idea. Some were for competitions. But everyone was thinking it would be a built form and used by people.” After a pause, she added: “But architecture is a mix between art and science, so we are always in between two things.”