Herzog & de Meuron review architecture’s masters of reinvention reveal their box of tricks

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A row of crumpled metal pipes lies in a glass vitrine in the Royal Academy, with the look of battered building-site detritus scavenged from a skip. These bits of old pipe, it turns out, have a hallowed status in the archive of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. They were used in the late 1990s to develop the unique profile of the windows in their Schaulager art storage facility near Basel. Plaster was cast against their pummelled surfaces, which was then digitally scanned and scaled up to create formwork, on which the building’s rugged concrete walls were poured. Jacques Herzog...