There is a 37-minute film, in the centre of the Royal Academy’s exhibition of the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, that hardly seems to be about architecture at all. Made by the Italian-French partnership of Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, it focuses on a 20-year-old rehabilitation centre for people disabled by accident or illness, designed by Herzog & de Meuron on a site in Basel. It features patients telling their stories and battling to regain their physical capabilities, and a closeup of a slug crossing a path. The building itself, a beautiful and calming environment of wood and sunlight and views of nature, stays in the background.
The previous and first room doesn’t show much by way of graspable architectural projects either. It is dominated by timber-framed vitrines stacked with the models, mockups and samples of materials with which Herzog & de Meuron investigate their designs. It’s like an alchemist’s laboratory, a cabinet of curiosities, a promiscuous but measured pile-up of shapes and substances. Multiple versions of a concert hall or a stadium or a skyscraper, in wood or cardboard or coloured plastic foam, jostle with models of a house at the same size, or fragments of molten-looking glass or refined copper, or a concrete panel imprinted with the image of a giant beetle.
There are also large photographic prints by the artists Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, nine in total; sophisticated mugshots of individual projects. These are the clearest depictions in the exhibition of actual buildings, but they still leave much out of sight and left to the imagination.
So the work is shown obliquely, which is striking, as Herzog & de Meuron, now a multinational concern with hundreds of employees, are architects with a capital A. That is to say, the tools of their art are the stuff and spaces of buildings, their materials, structure, shapes and lighting. They work with such things as gravity and bodily movement through a space – obvious enough, maybe, except that they like to play with expectations, such that you experience these properties as never before.
Thus, in the Dominus winery in California, completed in 1998, they had stones gathered from the surrounding territory, and placed in gabions – the wire cages used to make embankments on mountain roads – which then formed a long, low rectangular shelter for the glass-walled spaces where the wine is made. From a distance it looks massive, a part of the landscape, nigh-on Palaeolithic. Inside you find that they have manipulated the size and spacing of the stones, such that light streams through the spaces in the formerly solid-seeming envelope, as if between mineral leaves.
In the MKM Küppersmühle Museum in Duisburg, Germany, they made balletic stairs out of massive rust-coloured concrete. In the CaixaForum (2008), a cultural centre in Madrid, they made a masonry wall levitate. Herzog & de Meuron have an interest in nature, as in the earth walls of the 2014 herb-processing plant built for the Ricola confectionary company, but of an artificial kind, as in a pattern of large leaves imprinted on the translucent walls of a production and storage facility for the same business 20 years previously.
The colours of those foam models, also seen in some of their buildings, are those of algae, fungi, strange stones and chemicals, not the wholesome hues of trees and flowers – possibly a reflection of the fact that they work in the pharmaceutical city of Basel. Herzog & de Meuron’s projects can be a bit medieval, with pointy roofs and profiles, to the point of creepiness. They can be ultra-bourgeois, designing auditoriums and galleries for prosperous cities, but with undercurrents of decadence and disquiet. As intellectual as they seem to be, they flirt with glitz and kitsch, with scintillating reflections and crimson plush.
Their skill and sometimes brilliance at working with the substance of building comes with a recognition that architecture is not, by itself, all that interesting. The practice’s founders collaborated early in their career with the artist Joseph Beuys, and they continue to look outside their own profession for inspiration. They see that architecture is no more than a setting, if potentially of a transformative kind, of the lives in and around it.
This perception informs their RA show. The room with the models is mostly about making, the second, with the film, about inhabitation – in other words, about human actions rather than finished objects. The third and final room focuses on a not-yet-complete children’s hospital in Zurich, represented with drawings, a video game, a model and a lifesize replica of part of a bedroom. It is enhanced by augmented reality, which produces on your phone screen more vivid versions of your surroundings. It’s digital where the first room was physical, and interesting, although somehow less compelling.
The downside of the show’s indirect approach is that it may be mysterious to people who don’t already know something of the work, but it’s an admirable attempt to show what architecture is really about. It’s also a document of a remarkable practice.
Herzog & de Meuron is at the Royal Academy, London, until 15 October
