Strap in and enjoy the ride

It's happened much sooner than I expected: the art gallery and the funfair have converged. But as this exhibition of specially commissioned architectural pieces by eight artists shows, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This is the world’s most intelligent theme park, where each artwork is a "ride" of ideas. The German artist Michael Beutler has made a network of corridors of coloured paper, a three-dimensional Kandinksy painting from which it is tricky to exit. Dramatic tableaux look like they have been inspired by the Wizard of Oz: the Korean artist Do-Hu Suh has a large 5:1 scale model, in hypnotic detail, of his Korean home crashing into a three-storey American family house, a symbol of his move to the US. Rachel Whiteread, the British artist famous for her casting, contributes her collection of old doll’s houses. Laid out in darkness, illuminated from the inside, they look like a suburb from Beacons-field model village.

There’s even an outdoor recreation area: a collective of four Austrian artists, Gelitin, have built a pool on the Hayward’s balcony on which visitors can row small boats.

It’s entertaining, occasionally superficial, but it’s also a powerful survey of an important new area of artistic activity, which eschews the most predictable names of the environment genre (such as Gregor Schneider and Liam Gillick) and instead introduces British audiences to some key artists from South America and Asia.

Since the Nineties, artists have been expanding installation art into allencompassing rooms and full-scale buildings. Two directions have emerged. One group of artists make spaces like film-sets. So upstairs, there are a couple of rooms with huge holes blasted in chipboard walls, which look like the aftermath of a shotgun massacre, by highly regarded British artist Mike Nelson. The frenzied but textured and disciplined holes in the walls are a perverse play on gestural Abstract Expressionist painting.

The masterpiece of the show, again by Do-Hu Suh, blankets the ceiling in an effervescent orange gauze out of which floats a perfectly sewn transparent staircase — this is not a fairground ride but it has just as much impact.

A second group of architectural artists avoid the flamboyance of the setbuilders and create structures which seek to reinvent the rules of architecture. The ethereal "building" by gifted Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto is inspired by the human body — a skin of nylon stocking material is stretched over interlocking pieces of wood shaped like bones. It smells good, too — in the middle of this transparent tent a stocking nodule hangs down, packed full of aromatic cloves.

Until 25 August. Daily 10am-6pm, Friday until 10pm. Admission £10. (0870 3800 400; southbankcentre.co.uk).

Psycho Buildings: Artists And Architecture
The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
The South Bank Centre,Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX