Dancing about Architecture:Herzog & De Meuron @ the RA.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" is a quote that is often used to show how difficult it is to explain music using the written word. I've written about music (many times) but I've never, to the best of my knowledge, danced to architecture - despite loving a lot of it.

 

Sao Paulo Cultural Complex Lux (2009-12)

If, however, I was the sort of person who DID dance to architecture I'm afraid to report that the Royal Academy's Herzog & de Meuron show would have found my guilty feet to have no rhythm. I'd have remained, resolutely, a wallflower.

It's not that the Swiss firm haven't made some amazing buildings (they have) and more that there's really little you can get from looking at little models of them that you couldn't get from looking at photos on the Internet. Or, better still, actually visiting the buildings. There's some nice photo art from Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff (many showing Herzog & de Meuron creations) to pad out the show but that doesn't tell you much about Herzog & de Meuron really.

There's also information boards on the wall that you give you such mind numbingly dull facts that you start to glaze over after about three sentences. Herzog & de Meuron, apparently, don't just think about what a building looks like but how its users can interact with it. They think about space and green issues. But of course they do. They're architects. That's what architects do. This information is hardly a revelation.

Thomas Ruff - Signal Box, Basel (1994)

Thomas Ruff - Hongkong (2009)

Some history. (Jacques) Herzog & (Pierre) de Meuron began as an architectural partnership in 1978 and now employ six hundred architects. Based in Basel, Switzerland, they have built all around the world but they came to my attention when they converted London's former Bankside power station into Tate Modern in 2000. It's quite amazing as I'd lived in London for four years by then (and had been visiting for many more) and yet I can't even remember the power station before it became a gallery. How did I miss it?

The RA show includes models as well as material samples, tools, drawings, and films. Most of which, sadly, aren't very interesting when presented as standalone attractions. Some of the models represent buildings that were built. Others designs that were never realised. Frustratingly, they don't always tell you which is which.

There's a Lego House built for the Centre Pompidou in Paris (that's quite good, everyone likes Lego), a signal box from Basel, an unbuilt Greek Orthodox church that would have stood in Zurich, and an Italian stone house. They all look like they'd make fine buildings. But as models they don't impress. They serve more a practical use.

Lego House:One Specific Room (1985)

Central Signal Box (1994-99)

Greek Orthodox Church (1989)

Stone House (1982-88)

Andreas Gursky - Beijing (2010)

London is represented by the Tate Modern extension, Deptford's Laban Dance Centre, a Serpentine Gallery Pavilion from about a decade ago, and Chelsea's Stamford Bridge stadium and there's also a couple of models of the National Stadium in Beijing which Herzog & de Meuron built in collaboration with Ai Weiwei for the Beijing olympics in 2008. It got the nickname "the bird's nest" but looking at one of the models it could just as easily have been "the glazed ring doughnut".

Tate Modern Project (2005-16)

Laban Dance Centre (1997-2003)

 

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (2011-12) 

Stamford Bridge (2013)

National Stadium Beijing (2002-08)

National Stadium - Beijing (2002-08)

Andreas Gursky - Centre Pompidou (1995)

Andreas Gursky - Prada Tokyo (2004)

Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage and Art (2006-18)

I'm forever impressed by how architects create entire buildings. It seems a superhuman feat to me. So I should have enjoyed looking under the hood, so to speak, and seeing how it all works but it just felt cold. I didn't come away from the exhibition with much more knowledge about Herzog & de Meuron than I went into it with.

There's a film by Beka & Lemoine that told me precisely nothing at all and there's another by the architects themselves that wasn't remotely interesting either. It went on for half an hour. I couldn't watch it all. It was too boring - and I normally like (some) boring things.

Herzog & de Meuron - Project Observer (2023)

The first room was given over to the architectural models (and the Gursky & Ruff photographs), the second to the two rather unedifying films, and the third (and final) one to one specific project the architects have been working on:- the Kinderspital (Children's Hospital) in Zurich.

There's some vacuous guff about how hospitals have to "combine the highest levels of public accessibility with our most private personal moments" (no shit Sherlock) and how they are "places of comfort and care for patients, visitors and staff" - which suggest neither Mr Herzog or Mr de Meuron have ever had to spend eight hours sitting in A&E at King's.

Anyway, the room was crap. The caption boards were either full of platitudes or read as incredibly patronising and the few models they had up didn't look very interesting. But a crap room seemed the right way to end a crap exhibition. Which is a shame. Because as architects Herzog & de Meuron are great. As exhibitors, though, they're crap and this show felt a complete waste of time.

After I finished it I went for a walk round St James's Park to look at the pelicans, swans, geese, coots, and moorhens and even saw a man fall off the bridge into the lake. That made a much bigger splash than this disappointing exhibition did.

Kinderspital Zurich (2015)

Kinderspital Zurich (2019)