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.
“Basically,” Herzog told me over a beer in Basel last month, “I think architecture exhibitions are so boring. The actual architecture is always somewhere else, and we are just dealing with a representation. With this exhibition, we wanted to show the realities of what it is to make a building. It is important to put everything on the table – I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Recording the process behind their work has been a shared obsession since Herzog and Pierre de Meuron founded their office in 1978, having first met at school at the age of seven. Almost every sketch or model the duo have touched is preserved for posterity, now all housed in a purpose-built concrete bunker on the south side of Basel, known as the Kabinett. Three large vitrines from the Kabinett have been recreated in the first room of the RA exhibition, stacked high with 400 objects from 80 projects, ranging from sketches and scrappy foam models to weird blobs cast from of all kinds of gloop, forming a curious wunderkammer of odds and ends.
We find early competition models for the Beijing “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium, made from tangled cotton threads, like something you might scoop out from the depths of the washing machine. There are others made from matted, woven leaves, as if stolen from a fowl. An augmented-reality app allows these models to come alive – scan a code on your phone and the structural model of the stadium is summoned into being. Scan another, and a complex cat’s-cradle of air-conditioning pipes appears, bringing a model of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg to life.
But for all the seductive intrigue of the bric-a-brac, there is a frustrating lack of captions explaining what the projects actually are, and what you’re looking at. It feels very much conceived with fans in mind, providing a behind-the-scenes peek at the hallowed working models for those already familiar with the buildings. The curators say they wanted to avoid overwhelming visitors with text, and the architects say all the information is on their website, but some explanatory context would have been useful to shed light on the curios.
The next of the three rooms takes a completely different tack. A wall cuts diagonally across the middle of the dark space, with a triptych of video screens on one side, cycling through a dreamy montage of the practice’s buildings in use, and a 40-minute film on the other, focusing on the firm’s Rehab hospital in Basel. Completed in 2002, it is an astonishing place, as far removed from the windowless corridors and grim, wipe-clean world of UK hospitals as imaginable. On my recent visit, patients were relaxing in the numerous tree-lined courtyards, resting on their shaded wooden balconies, and enjoying aqua-therapy in the mesmerising swimming pool beneath a concrete pyramid studded with cosmic skylights. The film, by astute documentary makers Bêka & Lemoine, brings out the human life of the place, focusing on the stories of five patients, and the multiple ways that the building supports their recovery – although some more time dwelling on the architecture would have been helpful for those who’ve never seen it.
Continuing the healthcare theme, the final room is dedicated to showing one single project in detail, focusing on the Kinderspital (children’s hospital) in Zurich, from the 2012 competition stage through to construction. Due for completion next year, it is like Rehab 2.0 (and led by the same talented partner, Christine Binswanger) scaling up the model of irregular courtyards, with bedrooms arranged around the perimeter, each with its own pitched roof to give a domestic feel. Diagrams, models and an interactive video game reveal the different stages behind the evolution of the project, touching on digital BIM modelling, modular construction and the trials of actually executing a project of this complexity. It is an unusually dense amount of material to encounter in a museum like this (displayed in a style that verges on a trade show), and it’s a brave curatorial choice to expect a general audience to engage with it all. But it also helps to dispel some of the misleading glamour around the profession: architecture is mostly a very tedious, technical, difficult job. The playful production of experimental models is a tiny fraction of the laborious years of spreadsheets and CAD drawings that follow.
Bringing the hospital to life, a full-size, augmented-reality model of one of the bedrooms can be summoned on your phone, allowing you to walk in and around the space. A real-world fragment of a wall, bench and window anchors the digital version, which you can roam while walking on a carpet printed with the floor plan. It’s an impressive display of tech, but it feels like another gimmick. Surely the whole point of going to a physical exhibition is to experience real spaces and objects in person, and there remains something ultimately disheartening about being in a gallery and staring at your phone.
Herzog told me that their original idea for the exhibition was to make it almost entirely based in virtual reality, allowing visitors to explore projects through headsets, alongside physical props, designed to confound expectations.
“We made these weird freaks,” he said, excitedly, “almost like ghosts. There would be thin elements that you see in VR, but then you would touch them and they would be really fat. We wanted to explore how your senses can fall apart. It brings us back to these fundamental questions – our architecture has always been oriented to all the senses.” It sounds trippy, but the RA made the right call (encouraged by Covid restrictions). VR-heavy exhibitions tend to be underwhelming and involve lengthy queues.
In all of the poetry, magic and technical mastery on show here, there is still a major element lacking, for an office that claims to be putting everything on the table – namely, the political, financial and ethical realities that architecture is embroiled with. Why are the Rehab and Kinderspitals possible in Switzerland, but would be unimaginable to even dream of seeing in the UK? Why are many of the projects in the Kabinett now on hold or cancelled, like Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea Stadium? What does it mean to build a national library for a country that is engaged in the illegal occupation of its neighbour? And why, most tellingly of all, is the practice’s biggest-ever project in London completely absent from the show?
Herzog & de Meuron’s proposal to plonk a cluster of bloated office blocks, rising to 21 storeys, on top of the Victorian Liverpool Street Station (for Sellar, developer of the Shard), is among the most crass commercial speculations the capital has seen in recent years. There is a distinct sense, after the vocal backlash against the scheme, that the architects are increasingly uncomfortable with where they have found themselves. Working for a hard-nosed London developer isn’t quite the same as building for patrons of the arts. If they truly have nothing to hide, might it not be interesting to talk about that friction?
Herzog & de Meuron is at the Royal Academy, London, from 14 July to 15 October
