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.
