A row of crumpled metal pipes lies in a glass vitrine in the Royal Academy, with the look of battered building-site detritus scavenged from a skip. These bits of old pipe, it turns out, have a hallowed status in the archive of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. They were used in the late 1990s to develop the unique profile of the windows in their Schaulager art storage facility near Basel. Plaster was cast against their pummelled surfaces, which was then digitally scanned and scaled up to create formwork, on which the building’s rugged concrete walls were poured.
Jacques Herzog wanted to create “the sort of fuzzy edge you get when you run your finger along a sandcastle”, forming a horizontal fissure across the facade that looked like a “crack in the earth”. The resulting building is a beguiling thing, a great earthy fortress of art that looks as though it was chiselled out of the ground, its windows ruptured by some momentous tectonic tremor.
Such is the process behind the work of Herzog & de Meuron’s globe-trotting, Pritzker Prize-winning practice, whose experimental way of working is brought to vivid life in a new exhibition at the RA. Made famous here for their startling transformation of Bankside power station into Tate Modern at the turn of the millennium, they have gone on to build an unparalleled reputation for their ability to reinvent themselves for every single project, each building driven by an almost alchemical approach to materials, and an underlying interest in probing the weird and uncanny. Nothing they do is normal – especially when it comes to exhibitions.
