What is an architecture exhibition for? To showcase a singular vision, technical prowess, notions of good taste or something else?

Herzog & de Meuron’s show at the Royal Academy has bigger ambitions: “To let you into the process, to feel as if you are part of the design team,” says Vicky Richardson. The RA’s head of architecture co-curated the three-gallery survey “in close collaboration” with the Pritzker-prize winning Swiss firm, founded in 1978 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

This the first Herzog & de Meuron survey to be staged in London since a touring show at Tate Modern in 2005, which took up much of the Turbine Hall and mostly featured models on tables. The proposition here is that architecture — particularly the kind of eloquent buildings with punchy budgets that Herzog & de Meuron specialises in — is more than drawing, rendering and model-making. It is a process of close inquiry and intense observation.

The show succeeds in that, despite being overburdened by gimmicky tech and constrained by the limitations of three modest rooms in the RA’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries.

Herzog & de Meuron is known for avoiding a signature style in favour of originality in each building project, though you could argue its work is characterised by a certain restrained, icy glamour.

There are global cultural institutions, such as Tate Modern (above), the new M+ centre in Hong Kong, Madrid’s CaixaForum. There is the spectral National Stadium, AKA the “Bird’s Nest”, in Beijing. There are slick stores, such as Prada in Tokyo with its distinctively quilted glazing.

Scale models for some of its 600 projects are presented in the opening gallery in the form of a Wunderkammer — or cabinet of curiosities. These have been selected from the firm’s “Kabinett” archive building in Basel. There are rows of Tate Moderns — sponge, cardboard, perspex, plywood — alongside rows of CaixaForums, and so on. They are beautiful in their own right, though the intention is to show that Herzog & de Meuron’s archive is alive with ideas rather than gathering dust.

Two elements augment what would otherwise be standard exhibition fare: enormous framed photographs of a selection of the finished buildings by Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, the German photographers of the Dusseldorf School; and a specially commissioned app, which brings some static exhibits to three-dimensional life.

The Ruff and Gursky photographs are so good they upstage the models and the technology — all scale and drama. Most striking is a shot by Gursky of a previous Herzog & de Meuron exhibition (above) at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, taken in the mid-1990s, with visitors absorbed in analogue displays of drawings and models. The scene serves as a meta reminder of how distracting that Herzog & de Meuron app is turning out to be.

After some explanation by the RA’s staff, we download it and point our phone cameras at symbols positioned amongst the exhibits. Virtual, neon-coloured models build themselves in augmented reality. The Prada store appears over 360-degrees across the real gallery scene captured by the phone’s camera lens. It is novel and charming. We are told it is “a further evolution in [Herzog & de Meuron’s] constant experimentation with spatial perception and its exploration of how the human body and architecture relate in real-life situations”. Sure, you can step through virtual walls. For visitors without technical knowledge, though, it might be difficult to see how augmented reality relates to the architectural process.

More illuminating are two films in the second gallery by filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine, typical of those that Herzog & de Meuron uses to inform its work.

The first is a series of shots of people navigating Herzog & de Meuron buildings around the world. We notice patterns: they seek out quiet corners in London in exactly the same way they do in Madrid; they stand outside and smoke; they seem confused by pillars. Hospital patients find comfort in muted lighting; children can improvise a playground anywhere.

We observe — without being told — why a hospital staircase is wide (to help with physio); why a window sill is low and deep (so people can loll about reading books). A second, highly affecting film focuses on the patients in the Rehab Clinic for Neurorehabilitation and Paraplegiology in Basel, who appear to respond to the architecture in ways that enhance their recoveries.

The final room is the most technically ambitious, documenting the design process of a single building: the Universitäts Kinderspital in Zürich, a children’s hospital still under construction. Here, the app brings mind-blowingly detailed plans of this generous facility to life.

Again, this digital interface is a distraction at times. I see visitors lost in their screens, spinning wildly around the 360-degree models and careering into one another. The technology is good, but it is nowhere near as effective at conveying the experience of a Herzog & de Meuron building as Bêka & Lemoine’s simple, documentary style films, or Gursky and Ruff’s monumental images.

All the buildings in the RA exhibition are at the luxe end. Viewed in London, their swish Swiss clinics, with private rooms of generous dimensions and fabulous lakeside views, feel a world away from the desperate state of many UK hospital buildings. No exhibition can cover everything, but this one is silent on dilapidated NHS healthcare infrastructure. I wanted to understand what we could learn? What could we adapt? Is it just our un-Swiss budgets that fall short, or is it a lack of imagination?

Nevertheless and despite the technological overreach, there are moments here of real revelation for ordinary enthusiasts, on architectural inventiveness, ingenuity and why we seek out good buildings. This is an exhibition that rewards attention, patience and time. Forget the app, though; absorb yourself in the displays instead.