The architecture room of the Royal Academy’s annual event has been turned into a mesmerising ‘museum of making’ by the Turner-prize winners, full of intriguing insights and mind-boggling exhibits

Slimy curtains made of seaweed and hog guts dangle from the ceiling in the central rotunda of the Royal Academy, with the look of slippery skins shed by some reptilian creature. They hang above a busy scene, where workbenches brim with half-finished maquettes and material samples, next to a teetering prototype of a structural stone tower and a plaster mould used to manufacture toilets. A brightly painted model of a Ghanaian coffin, shaped like a phoenix, stands on a plinth made of rubble, while pastel-hued tiles formed from crushed seashells hang on the wall nearby.

This is the architecture room of the RA Summer Exhibition – but not as we know it. The usual selection of little model buildings and impenetrable drawings, often sped through by baffled members of the visiting public, has been transformed this year into a mesmerising museum of making. It is the radical vision of Assemble, the young Turner prize-winning architecture collective, who were ushered into the hallowed ranks of Royal Academicians in 2022, and have breathed fresh life into how their rarefied discipline is shown here.