Standing face to face with an angel brandishing a golden goose can give you an entirely different perspective on the world. It is an experience that awaits in the Royal Academy where, jacked up eight metres into the air, you find yourself eye-level with one of the galleries' ornate ceilings, swallowed into a scene of ovolos and astragals, anthemions and palmettes, a dense world of plaster mouldings.
Up here, everything looks bigger. You could pluck the plump golden fruit that hang from the looping garlands, or sample an egg from the egg-and-dart frieze. You can follow the empty gaze of the winged messengers, and peer down on ant-like visitors below. This is all detail you wouldn't even notice from the gallery floor, yet raised up into the lofty realm of the ceiling it becomes your entire world.
This view is found at the top of a surreal wooden structure that now looms above the gallery like a gigantic children's table, a square platform supported on four chubby cylindrical legs. It is one of seven such installations that fill the main halls of the RA, each designed by a different architect from around the world. The piece in question is the work of Pezo von Ellrichshausen, a Chilean-Argentine couple who craft houses of extraordinary power in concrete and timber, that feel hewn from their raw materials – often aided by clifftop locations of spectacular natural beauty. They are buildings tuned to a sense of weight and mass, of rough and smooth, of journeys from dark to light.
It is these interests that have found their way into the palatial Beaux-Arts interior in central London, distilled into the teetering timber lookout. You ascend via narrow spiral staircases that rise through the legs, opening on to a deck where high walls frame your field of vision, blocking everything below cornice level. The effect is to condense this echoing gallery into its upper third, a form of compression that makes everything more exaggerated. The gentle plaster coving suddenly feels like the heavy vaulting of a cellar; the pitched roof-light becomes a soaring atrium. The route back down is then something of a linear decompression chamber, an enclosed zigzag ramp that switches back and forth through progressively darker corridors in an extended journey back to the gallery floor.
Like all of the exhibits, it is a piece of this architect's manifesto, condensed. The idea behind the show, in the words of its curator, Kate Goodwin, is to "encourage visitors to question their ideas about architecture and test its capacity to move them". The architects were selected, she says, "because they distinctly engage with the ways architecture might move beyond practical and functional concerns to address the human spirit".
Architecture is usually the product of multiple, conflicting constraints, so how does it fare in the context of a gallery? Shielded from the realities of climate and context, client and user, planning and building regs, what of architecture is left? Liberated from the obligations and contingencies of a real building, can it jump free and take on a greater sensory power – or is it hollowed of all meaning and left to fall flat?
The results in the Sensing Spaces exhibition lie somewhere between these two camps. In a pair of rooms, shrouded with heavy black curtains, the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has erected a beguiling structure from impossibly slender bamboo rods. Whittled down to 4mm and atmospherically lit from below, these delicate fronds warp and weave their way into a sort of vaporous mountain. It is a deceptive, shapeshifting mass: from some angles it has echoes of a crystalline molecular structure; from others it looks like a matted tangle of hair pulled from the plughole.
There are also sinister strains of The Wicker Man, the structure forming outlines of flames licking at a pyre, and even a faint whiff of aftershave – the effect of the bamboo being soaked in essence of cypress and tatami. Where Pezo von Ellrichshausen focus the gaze, framing views of what is there, Kuma wants you to transcend the weighty pile of Burlington Gardens and float away on his scented breeze.
The result is a little insipid, more model to look at than space to explore, lacking the layered sense of interior sequence that characterises his buildings. And, as much as your children will try, they will be forbidden from crawling through the structure's inviting tunnels, lest they cause the delicate construction to collapse in a heap.
One of the most powerful spaces in the show comes in the rooms designed by Dublin-based practice Grafton, architects of the Stirling prize-shortlisted Limerick medical school, who have somehow managed to thrust a vast concrete megastructure through the roof of the grade II-listed gallery. Great grey slabs plunge down from the ceiling, forming an interlocking play of cubic volumes, filtering fine shafts of light down across their faces into the ethereal gloom. Like entering some Blade Runner cathedral, the composition makes the room appear to soar upwards, way beyond its actual height.
In the gallery beyond, they use a similar technique to achieve the opposite effect: bright white fins hang like a floating toast rack above your head, washing the room with a soothing balm of natural light. It comes as no surprise that these two spaces are earmarked for the forthcoming yoga evening in March.
Elsewhere, there is a maze, formed from walls of tree branches by the Chinese architect Li Xiaodong, which winds its way around to a secret zen garden. Set in a darkened room, lit only by its glowing white floor, it feels like walking through a forest in the snow at night, a romantic journey punctuated by tea-house cubby holes along the way.
African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré injects some playfulness into the show with a strange, undulating archway built from plastic waffle packaging sheets, that squeezes its way through the doorway between two galleries, forming an igloo-like cave where you can recline. Visitors are encouraged to poke coloured straws through the waffle panels with the idea that, by the end, the structure will look like a big hairy monster. It will no doubt be a runaway triumph with kids, but it has the air of a scrappy student project – disappointing given the intelligence of Kéré's school buildings in Burkina Faso.
The Pritzker prize-winning elder statesmen of Portuguese architecture, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura have been the most laconic in their contributions, with differing degrees of success. De Moura's piece does a simple thing very well, replicating the doorways between two of the galleries in thinly cast concrete, cranked off axis as if they have taken their first step out into the room, and are ready to begin tottering through the building. In one move, it forces us to shift our path and undermines all assumptions about the stability of the building. In the courtyard – reserved for the most senior of the bunch – Siza has continued the theme, showing the journey of a column in three stages, from complete, to standing capital-free, to toppling over as it drunkenly leaves the Academy. But the result is too gnomic to be of much impact.
So what to make of this theme park of spatial experiences, this miniature petting zoo of global architects? Some of it is fun, sure, and the best rooms might even give you a frisson of spiritual transcendence, when it's not too busy. But ultimately there is something unsatisfactory about the whole endeavour. These are simulations of architecture, erected at speed by a team of set-builders, to allow you to experience architectural ideas by proxy. It is not the real thing, and sometimes it's hard to escape the feeling of walking through a series of maquettes, built at the wrong scale. Being in a room made of cast concrete, for instance, is a very different thing to being in once made of hastily painted MDF – the reality of Grafton's trickery.
In her catalogue essay, Kate Goodwin hopes the show will "heighten our awareness of the sensory realm of architecture and thereby encourage the creation of a more rewarding built environment". If it inspires visitors to think more about their surroundings, that can only be a good thing; but by reducing it to pure spectacle, a tranquilliser dart of sensory titillation, it's in danger of missing the bigger picture of what architecture actually is.