Los Carpinteros, Show Room, 2008, cinder blocks, fishing nylon, Ikea and B&Q furniture. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photo: Stephen White.

The title of the show was indeed provocative: Psycho Buildings! Not sure what to expect, I had a faint idea of art imitating architecture imitating life in an extreme, spectacular manner. I was only half right as the prefix ‘psycho’ does not so much refer to architectural flights of fancy, as to deviant architectural acts against the triumph of modernism and its ultra sleek rational homogeneity, from the high-tech materials used, to the breezy facades paying homage to the great Abstraction. The term was initially coined in 1988 by the late Martin Kippenberger and from his book of B/W photographs of unrealised, unheroic ‘hand-made’ structures. His work belonged to the iconoclastic tradition of artists such as Robert Gober, Christophe Büchel, Vito Acconci, who have toyed with built environments in every possible semi-realistic and irreverent way.

Art and architecture always draw inspiration from one another, art learning valuable lessons of volume and proportion, as well as using architecture as a mood-provoking vehicle, and architecture aiming to create living works of art with a function. In the case of Psycho Buildings, art attempts to bring architecture down to its scale in order to delve into the mysterious world of the great unknown which is the space human beings occupy and the synergies that develop within. An endeavour such as this acquires great significance, in a time when, across the geographical axis of London-Dubai-Shanghai, a new architectural language of gigantism has developed, a kind of architecture with a brand new celebrity status that overlooks the human factor, for a constant, yet futile, quest for the holy grail of masonry — the altius, fortius and most exuberant building ever, until the laying of the foundations of the next one, as it often happens.

It is also only fairly recently that we come across discussions that include art, architecture or design in the same sentence. Whether this is a new fruitful cross-disciplinary approach or a recent trend to homogenise as many creative ideas as possible is not the case here. What is important are the interesting results coming up when different disciplines merge. Both architects and artists are preoccupied with space, volume and providing a shelter for both body and soul, as well as a vehicle for social and cultural commentary. And this is central for this exhibition.

The journey inside the premises of the Hayward Gallery, as well as out in the open on the roof of the archetypal Southbank psychobuilding, a true ‘ode-to-concrete’ structure, is one of many interesting stops. The very first experience when entering the space is an olfactory one. The walk-in environment by Ernesto Neto makes us remember how important the sense of smell is for the memories of our first understanding of space and our relation to it. It is a see-through, palpable yet weightless membrane-like structure, built mainly by scent that ‘absorbs’ us inside its underbelly like some sort of second skin, making us seem like floating apparitions when seen from above. As we walk inside, we come across ‘gland-looking’ long nets full of spices tangling from its roof, exuding pungent notes, whispering tales of the Levant. The epidermis of the work engages with the spectator’s, so much so that the concepts of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ merge, as the skin itself serves as a container and a divider, carrying the history of mankind on every one of its cells.

On a more personal level, Do-Ho Suh, in Fallen Star, rebuilds the memories of his past that relate to the houses he once lived in. He constructs a pair of model houses, on a scale of 1:5, one of the traditional Korean homes in Seoul where the artist spent his childhood, the other of a four-storey apartment he first lived in the US. The houses have crashed into one another, in a vivid metaphor of the interpenetrations of memory. Every little item is meticulously constructed with minute detail, from staircases and different wall papers, to furniture and kitchen utensils, a life-moment frozen in time, including narrative elements such as courier boxes on the hall table and scattered dollars on the floor. It is compulsive viewing where one could stand and look for hours, comparing and contrasting the differences between the two worlds — the eastern open space against the western opaqueness — and possibly identifying pieces of one’s own life in it.

On the top floor gallery, the same artist has installed his famous Staircase, which made her first enthralling appearance in the Serpentine few years ago. From an almost fluorescent floor of transparent pink-red fabric, a life-size staircase hovers from its centre, without somehow reaching the ground. The steps, the banisters, even the light fittings, have all been made from the same weaving, a fabric that dreams must be made from. ‘I bring this space with me wherever I go’ says the artist reasserting the powerful role of memory in peoples’ lives.

There seems to be a communication between Do-Ho Suh and the works by the ‘grande poetess of memory’ Rachel Whiteread, who also uses doll’s houses that she has been collecting for more than 20 years. Place, is a miniature diorama of English vernacular suburbia. The narrative unfolds immediately after dusk, the most peaceful time of the day, as the area is illuminated only by the atmospheric lights in the houses themselves. However, the rooms are empty and look strangely anthropomorphic, their windows staring poignantly into the darkness. Whiteread, since the time of Ghost, 1990, and House, 1993, (the last, recently demolished, 19th century terrace house in London’s east end), creates casts of the empty space inside buildings, in an attempt to solidify loneliness and emptiness in a melancholic, elegiac manner that refers to buildings as once breathing organisms, imbued with life through human experience.

In juxtaposition to the silence of Whiteread’s work, the Showroom-Frozen Study of a Disaster, by Havana-based Cuban collective Los Carpinteros, capture a still moment of total havoc, when architecture becomes a perfect host for violent acts of everyday horror. An explosive blast wrecks an apartment/furniture showroom, without defining whether it is caused my man or by natural forces. It is an installation that resembles a stereoscopic photograph or, more appropriate, a frozen moment in a movie special effect, where dismembered bits of wall and furniture, electrical goods and toilet furnishings, all suspend in mid-air, using clear fishing line.

The frozen action in the messy Showroom makes violence looking like a cartoon scene, whereas real terror looms in the empty gallery space, where Mike Nelson places the remake of To the Memory of HP Lovecraft, 1999, seen at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh. Hayward’s version feels as if some creature from Lovecraftzs horror fictions got caught in the room and tried frantically to escape, banging, chewing and scratching the walls. We never get to see the Thing. Is it us or is it It, that the barred windows and the trapdoor try to keep out?

Up to this point in the show, art provided a platform for architecture to unfold narratives of experience and memory, of loss and everyday horror. What I am about to discover as I move up to the open-air terrace seems to go beyond the physical boundaries of architecture, even beyond art. It is an exercise in Utopia. I found myself rowing — and I am not teleported to the Henley regatta — in the rain, on a lake, on top of the city of London! Gelitin, the Viennese collective, in one of their ‘demented playground’ interventions, have flooded Hayward’s sculpture court, throwing in four wooden boats made from junk furniture. The result is an unexpectingly fitting Claudian addition to the 20th century cement-clad building giant, celebrating its 40th anniversary, and the experience is completely exhilarating as I man my wee oars into the murky sunset …

Art made the impossible happen and Boullé would be proud to see an irrational plan such as this being materialised, as well as he would definitely appreciate the construction of one of the spherical structures he was so much fond of, where people, through an air-lock, would float in a clear plastic ‘cloud’ as if in mid-flight, in the other sculpture court above the city’s skyline, in the Observatory Air-Port-City by Tomas Saraceno. And as Saraceno very succinctly states ‘Utopia exists until it is created’.