Architectural drawings at Hauser & Wirth

A lot of fuss is made over how difficult it is to exhibit architecture. But a quick visit to Hauser & Wirth's new architecture season in its bucolic Somerset setting should sort that out. Here is a wide-ranging exhibition of architectural drawings from the greatest names of 20th-century architecture, set alongside Smiljan Radic's bizarre but enjoyable Serpentine Pavilion from last year and a lightly underpowered sculptural installation by Alvaro Siza that looks better here than it did in the Royal Academy courtyard for which it was commissioned last year. Easy.

The drawings here are the key. Architectural drawing is a strangely overlooked medium. It is, of course, a tool but it is also a critical medium for ideas. The drawing often captures and embodies the creative spark far more succinctly than the finished building, which is subjected to the burden of reality; the endless small compromises imposed by economics, bureaucracy, gravity and weather.

Most of the 100 drawings here are ends in themselves - sketches for visionary projects. This is an alternative history of modernism from the Age of Enlightenment, an architectural counterfactual told through the largely unrealised. There are grandiose landscapes of death (Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine's 1785 dark design for a National Cemetery, for example) alongside elegantly rendered watercolours of delicate Secessionist tombs.

There are Iakov Chernikhov's constructivist dreams of colourful industrial complexity from the grimmest years of Stalin's terror, when modernism had been abandoned in favour of classical bombast. And there are Siza's vibrant sketchbooks in which his taut lines suggest his minimal modernist vernacular. Chernikhov's drawings turn out to be tiny - perhaps easier to hide from Stalin's secret police. Siza's sketches are populated by angels and by images of the architect himself. His hands, shirt front and cigarettes appear in the drawings, bringing the sketches back into reality while bodily projecting their architect into his own ideas.

But best of all there are the laconically sardonic drawings of Italian provocateurs Superstudio. These pop/surrealist interventions of massive geometric blankness into cities or landscapes encapsulate the fears and anxieties of a 1960s and 70s society profoundly uncertain of its own technology, its impact and its place in the cosmic order. Superstudio's striking images are familiar from their collages but seeing the sketches here is a revelation. They emphasise the contrast between the complexity of the natural and man-made landscapes and the dumb geometry of mechanical production.

The big names are present too: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Aldo Rossi. Each is represented by fine works and the small scale of their drawings (and the juxtaposition it allows) draws out some fascinating parallels between proposals that might otherwise appear to have little in common. Setting van der Rohe's ethereal glass tower beside Cedric Price's designs for Battersea Power Station creates a curious collision of sublime and ridiculous. Placing Yona Friedman's skeletal superstructure design for Paris to expand into beside OMA's spiralling drawing for an unexecuted EuroDisney Hotel illustrates two poles of a possible future: idealistic, abstract grid or corporate surrealism.

This is architecture at its most free - thinking through drawing. The exhibition reminds us of its lost utopias and a century of radical rethinking of the city. The irony is that now cities are expanding exponentially, architecture has retreated into a globalised banality that adds nothing new to the existing metropolis. The show is a riposte to contemporary ennui and an implicit condemnation of outsourcing representation to computers, which can render but not think through the medium.

It is not all drawings. Radic's luminous broken eggshell pavilion sitting on sarsen stones recalls the nearby neolithic monuments, and Dan Graham's wavy minimalist "S-curve" wall melts seamlessly into the courtyard. The gallery's grounds, landscaped by Piet Oudolf, are a delight, as are the gallery buildings with their combination of rough-luxe restoration and quietly elegant new build. It is a huge compliment to curators Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lahteenmaki that architecture suddenly seems a doddle to display - and a rebuke to contemporary architecture that it has largely lost its nerve.

Until June 21, hauserwirthsomerset.com

Images: Courtesy of the estates of the artists

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