Everyone in the family can play with architecture at two London exhibitions, writes Emma Cullinan.

ADULTS and children sit around the edge of a large bubble, legs stretched out, basking in the solar gain afforded by the sphere' s plastic membrane cooking beneath the London sun. Way up above their heads people lie on a suspended sheet, their outlines shadowy against the fabric.

They are here to experience artists as builders, but if the children present are aware that they are being offered lessons in the emotional, perceptual and psychological aspects of architecture that the organisers are hoping to engender, then they show little appreciation of that. What excites them is the physical aspect of these exhibits.

This exhibition Psycho Buildings: Artists' take on Architecture, which celebrates the 40th aniversary of the Hayward Gallery at London's South Bank, offers a happy family outing because people can play with the structures here, and there is much running from one exhibit to another (adults too) to see what future fun can be had.

The exhibition name comes from a book of photographs by German artist Martin Kippenburger designed to offer alternatives to the "rationalism and abstraction of Modernist architecture" - yet there is abstraction in some of these exhibits despite artists' descriptions that seek to land them in the tangible.

But the lack of functionalism here is part of the thrill of these structures, and it shows how people react positively to exciting and demanding buildings.

Ironically, the Psycho Buildings exhibition is in a late Modern - somewhat Brutalist - 1960s building sitting between the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre which make up some of London's South Bank.

As each of these buildings went up they excited people in both an angry and hail-to-the-future senses.

But the structures have settled in over the decades showing that concrete can age well if it is beautifully formed and massed.

Curators of London are having fun with structures at the moment. On the day I was at the Hayward, a large fake grass lawn was laid out beside the National Theatre. On it were vast armchairs on which people basked as if it were a perfectly natural thing.

Anthony Gormley had fun with the Hayward recently when he put his sculptures - cast as always from his own body - on and around the building (as well as on various tower blocks across London).

In the Psycho Buildings exhibition, the artists - collectively known as Gelitin - have also used the Hayward as a platform, turning an outdoor sunken concrete area on the roof into a boating pond: "The incongruity of this pastoral idyll suspended high above the ground and nestling against the Hayward's concrete Brutalism adds to its parodic intent," we are told.

Another clash takes place in the piece by Do Ho Suh who exquisitely details the sense of displacement he felt when he moved from Korea to New York. He has built a scaled version of his Korean home crashing into the apartment building he moved into in the States.

While the US furniture is mainly intact - in the dolls' house like building - all of his belongings in the Korean house have been tipped into his new life and home.

In a separate exhibit he has made red fabric stairs - a copy of those in his New York apartment - offering the notion that when you move between countries you can fold up favourite parts of buildings and take them with you.

Rachel Whiteread found wide fame when she filled a house with concrete and removed the outer walls, thus making something out of nothing.

Here she has created a "village" of houses on a hillside which digs out of your subconscious the fact that when we look at homes we wonder at the lives within. These houses - some lit internally - are all eerily empty.

The only architectural practice in this exhibition is Atelier Bow-Wow which has built a satisfactorily noisy metal "Life Tunnel" running from one gallery space to another - forcing you to crouch at the start and gradually letting you grow to full height by the end, just like our progression through life.

They were inspired by tunnels hidden in the structure of the Hayward gallery which was designed by architects from the (former) London County Council, three of whom went on to become part of Archigram.

This group of architects played with new ideas of form, many never built, including a wearable house called the Suitaloon.

Such a link between architecture and fashion is being addressed across the river from the Hayward in the new Embankment Galleries at Somerset House, where the remit is to cover a broad spectrum of the arts.

On first entering the exhibition, Skin and Bones, Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, the link between the two disciplines seems a little forced. Both architecture and fashion are human shelters, we are reminded. They both express ideas of personal, social and cultural identity and "reflect the ambition of the age".

The exhibition takes the 1980s as its starting point and, once we are in the mind of the fabric-like curving, silver, computer-aided design structures of that decade and beyond, we realise that comparing buildings with clothes is going to be easy enough.

It also becomes clear that - on the architectural side - we are entering the territory of Daniel Libeskind, Future Systems, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Will Alsop and Bernard Tschumi.

"As advances in materials technology and computer software have pushed the frontiers of each discipline, buildings have become more fluid and garments more architectonic," say the Skin and Bones curators.

The exhibition is divided into themes, such as Shelter, Deconstruction, Wrapping, Pleating - some with a wider brief than others.

You are soon gathered into the detective story, linking one discipline with another: under Deconstruction, the renovation of Frank Gehry's family home in California, using store-bought industrial materials, links with fashion designers Commes des Garcons New Essentials collection of 1999 which combines unconventional shapes and fabrics together in the one garment.

Under Identity, we have Libeskind's Berlin Jewish museum compared with fashion designer Alexander McQueen's Widows of Culloden and Highland Rape collections, and Hussein Chalayan's Afterwords collection which "explores the idea of having to flee one's home in times of strife".

More literal are Gehry's Pleated IAC building in New York and Miyake Issey's Rhythm Pleats collection of 1989 and under Printing, any number of fashion designers can be compared with such as Herzog and de Meuron's leaf printed Ricola building in Mulhouse-Brunstatt, France. The weave of Herzog and de Meuron's Chinese Olympic building also had obvious links with certain fabrics and clothes.

Both Psycho Buildings and Skin and Bones want to make architecture more accessible although both have taken the more experimental side of architecture - the high street this is not, neither in buildings or the clothes.

The ongoing London Festival of Architecture has aspects that are fun, fun, fun, alongside the more serious talks and events.

Take the recent architecture jelly competition - taking the notion of wobbly buildings into the culinary arena - in which participants were invited to dress as a jelly or trifle as well as turn jelly into architecture.

All three events implore people to come and play with architecture - both physically and conceptually - and hopefully clients will see how experimentalism in design can excite people.

• Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture is at The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London SE1 8XX until August 25

• Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, Somerset House, London WC2, until August 10, 0044 207 8454600

• www.southbankcentre.co.uk; www.somersethouse.org.uk/skinbones