Herzog & de Meuron at the Royal Academy review

The architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron met at primary school in Basel back in 1957, said Robert Bevan in the Evening Standard. Since then, they have produced 600-plus buildings all over the world, ranging from luxury apartments to “cultural institutions”: in the UK alone, the cutting-edge projects they have overseen include Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, the Royal College of Art’s new outpost in Battersea, south London, and the conversion of the old Bankside power station into Tate Modern.

Now, the Swiss duo are the subject of this “unusual” new exhibition, which promises to lift the lid on their design process. It is not strictly a retrospective: rather it is billed as an introduction to their “method” and their ethical approach to big architectural projects. The promise is that the show will use everything from augmented reality headset displays to replicas of pieces of furniture they’ve designed to demonstrate how their projects are conceived and built – while swerving the clichés of the standard architectural exhibition.

Herzog & de Meuron’s “brilliance” is not in doubt, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Browse through a replica of their archives in the opening gallery, filled with small models of their designs and “scuffed, cardboard-and-masking-tape mock-ups”, and you might just get a sense of their global influence. Alas, the cabinets don’t hold the attention for long enough to offer much more than that: rifling through this vast assemblage could “stifle even the most willing exhibition-goer’s inquisitiveness”. It’s a laborious introduction to a show that is markedly short on visual spectacle and on material to illuminate the duo’s achievements. A 37-minute video about a clinic they built in Basel hardly even addresses the architecture, instead focusing on the patients. Should you wish to know more about the design, you are obliged to download an app, which is pretty infuriating.

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The show does bring Herzog & de Meuron’s more experimental side to “vivid life”, said Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. We see, for instance, how “a row of crumpled metal pipes” provided the inspiration for a “beguiling” art storage facility in Switzerland: plaster was cast against them before they were digitally scanned and deployed as a framework for the structure’s “rugged concrete walls”. Yet it’s “frustrating” that so few captions are provided, and the show is selective to say the least: there is no explanation for the scotching of their plan for a new Chelsea stadium for Roman Abramovich; nor do we hear about the major backlash to their proposal “to plonk a cluster of bloated office blocks” on top of Liverpool Street Station – a scheme that is surely “among the most crass commercial speculations the capital has seen in recent years”. Overall, this is an exhibition that poses as many questions as it answers.

Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 15 October