Celebrity architecture has seen more than a few ‘starchitect’ halos slip in the past decade.
By contrast, Swiss studio Herzog & de Meuron, designers of Tate Modern, the Laban Centre, and a luscious cylinder of luxury apartments in London – as well as cultural institutions across the globe – has an unsullied reputation.
They have repeatedly stated that the morality of architecture or politics hold little interest for them yet their thoughtful built record appears to confirm them as good guys, interested in subtlety and solidity not chasing instant icon status or design’s Instagrammable one-liners.
Rather than being a retrospective this unusual new show at the Royal Academy, produced in collaboration with the firm itself, attempts to trace not so much their history – Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron met in a Basel primary school in 1957 and in their early 70s are still producing brilliant buildings – as their working method and caring values.
Three smaller RA galleries are used. The first contains a full-size replica of the H&dM archive cabinets in Basel displaying models showing the evolution of projects, from their pillowy glass tower for Prada in Tokyo to the extraordinary Elbphilharmonie floating like a manga castle above a Hamburg warehouse. Physical models testing surfaces, materials and volumes are here supplemented by an augmented reality app through which you can conjure more castles in the air.
The next two rooms focus on medical buildings rather than the practice’s cultural behemoths. The first shows a film of the lovely woody physical REHAB clinic in Basel where you have to peer around the healing patients if you want to see the enviably airy hospital spaces they are sitting in.
The white-on-white second gallery concentrates solely on Zurich children’s hospital, still under construction after years of careful design. It is a humane glass and timber miniature city set around circular plazas and an internal main street. An entire wall shows its dizzying planning while a full-sized mock-up of a patient’s room in pure white when rendered by the AR app reveals something worthy of a Scandi hotel.
Entirely absent from the discussion is why the Swiss can have such nice things and our Private Finance Initiative hospitals are falling apart while bleeding the NHS dry in interest payments. Yet this is the murky reality of why our architecture is like it is.
Herzog & de Meuron’s own missteps include the proposal to bury Liverpool Street station in gloom in order to allow stonking commercial air-rights offices above. Not people centred at all. Their halos have had a little wobble. But no models of Liverpool Street either in the archive Kabinett at the RA.
The display demonstrates that better architecture is possible in better worlds but not how we get there. In the absence of decent politics and ethics, even spatial purity can be illusory.
