Herzog & de Meuron at the Royal Academy — never mind the buildings, here’s the process

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With the opening of the Schaulager in the Swiss town of Basel in 2003, architects Herzog & de Meuron initiated the shift in curatorial attention from the exhibition space to the archive. Here, in their home town, in this vast, enigmatic shed, they created a warehouse for art, not a museum but a place in which, in theory at least, it was the visitor who determined the objects that were of interest rather than the curator or the institution. Twenty years later the trend is gathering pace: the V&A is building an open storage facility in east London and the Boijmans van Beuningen opened its version in Rotterdam last year.

With the construction of the Kabinett (2014), a concrete structure looming over the old railway yards in Basel, this 45-year-old practice — founded in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron — turned their archival attention on themselves. This massive concrete box, almost medieval in scale and presence, would house their own vast archives of design and process but also of art and photography. It is designed as a public archive capable of evolving into a museum. Any exhibition then of the architects’ work must, in a way, compete with this legacy.

The last exhibition of their work was housed in another of their creations, the cavernous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London. Their newest show is in the very different confines of the classical Royal Academy in London, a space lacking in the raw, brutal qualities of their architecture.

So what they have done is to import the cabinets from the Kabinett. Or at least reconstruct them. The first room is filled with large timber-framed glass vitrines which are stuffed with the working models, material samples and waste products of their design processes, illustrating how architecture progresses and how emerging technologies influence it.

There is a roughly taped-up cardboard model of their “Bird’s Nest” stadium (designed with Ai Weiwei, who later disassociated himself from the project) for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and there is an exquisite copper model for their railway signal box in Basel (1999). Their preoccupation with skins and surfaces is displayed here in abundance, from that copper to the ceramics used in their M+ museum in Hong Kong and the bronze of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, but also the rammed earth walls of their Ricola Herb Centre in Switzerland, the coarse ground, the pebbles and the mud. This is categorically a display of architecture as a material practice, far removed from the contemporary curators’ vogue for architects who engage in social and environmental activism or spatial justice.

Yet unlike, say, the current Norman Foster exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris, it refuses to fetishise the finished building. Instead we are presented with the exhaust, the detritus of process placed in a vitrine. The things here are intriguing but this is a cabinet of curiosities and not a traditional retrospective with sculptural models on plinths and suspiciously exquisite construction drawings. But then neither are there glimpses of anything personal here. Even Foster’s show features his old snapshots and early sketchbooks. Here we see architecture as a collaborative pursuit, the practice as workshop.

While we might expect large-format photos in an architecture exhibition, here we find not architectural photography but architecture as a subject for a photographer. That photographer is Thomas Ruff, with whom H&deM have been collaborating for decades. And just as we are shown how their design has developed through the application and evolution of technology, so we see on one wall a conventional, if epic, photo of the Ricola storage building (1987) amid other shots which seem to be blurred and pixelated. At the end, a huge photo-collage fantasia of their Tai Kwun centre in Hong Kong is set against an X-ray skyline with buildings appearing as structural cages being overwhelmed by speculative foliage.

The first of the three rooms does all this. It is also employs an augmented reality app which sees chunks of structure floating about on your phone screen as if in real space. It works better than most of these ventures but fails to add a huge amount to the material quality of the things behind glass.

The next room is dark and quiet. A big screen in the middle. One side features films of views of their buildings, each seen as a triptych. It is a reminder of how many astonishing structures they have contributed to architecture since their foundation in 1978. The other side features a newly commissioned film from architecture’s pre-eminent filmmakers, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, an exploration of the practice’s Rehab clinic for neurorehabilitation in Basel. A pioneering and humane building made for people who suddenly find themselves confined by their disabilities. The humanity and the joy in simple things — a garden, a breeze, the skylights which allow patients to enjoy views of the clouds from their beds — is abundant and allowed to shine through without words.

This leads us into the final room and its subject, the architects’ plans for the huge and nearing completion Kinderspital (children’s hospital) in Zurich. This is a very different kind of architecture to that which we might be used to seeing displayed in the cultural context. Fiercely complex, highly serviced and technical.

It is presented here in a ghostly white room with a mocked-up section of a child’s hospital room with its opening porthole window and seats. On the rear wall a huge plan drawing reveals the complexity of the construction in all its meticulous detail. This is architecture not as precious finished object but difficult details, conditions and gestation.

It is a powerful statement and here the augmented reality kicks up a gear — point your phone at the plan and a construction site envelops you in all its dark contingent impenetrability. The contrast between this clinical white room and the dark density of the construction site is stark. In that gap lies an entire world. That, it seems to me, is what Herzog & De Meuron are attempting to convey. This is not a retrospective, not a hagiographic rear-view but a paean to the power of architecture to make the world better through building.

To October 15, royalacademy.org.uk