I won't be surprised if the next time I go to the Hayward it has been filled up with honey, turned on its side, or simply burnt to ashes and scraped into a big steel urn. Last summer's excellent Anthony Gormley show let the artist inhabit the gallery so thoroughly you might have wondered if he ever intended to leave,  and now, with Psycho Buildings, they've let eleven artists go even further, as if locked in a contest of dares with Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. I picture the director calling the police in tears, like one of those teenagers you read about who tries to have a little party in his parents' house and then finds out it's been advertised on Bebo as some sort of 900-capacity gladiatorial rave.

The most talked-about work will be Gelitin's Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted With Without Title, in which the Austrian artists' collective have filled one of the Hayward's outdoor sculpture terraces with water and let visitors row around in little boats. Like Gormley's Blind Light, there's something of the theme park to it, and I think the idea is to create an optical illusion which makes you think you could sail right off the edge and crash through the roof of the BFI – but something's not quite right with the water levels, and without this crucial scare the work seems fun but purposeless. Perhaps one's jadedness here is a casualty of the South Bank's existing reputation for spatial games: put the same thing in the National Portrait Gallery and it would be quite a trip.

More striking are three works with an appetite for destruction. Mike Nelson's To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft is an installation which lets us creep into the upper galleries only minutes after some monster has departed: the walls are scratched and bitten, and there are piles of shoggoth excrement in the corners. It's compelling, if a bit short on gore. I also enjoyed Do Ho Suh's Fallen Star 1/5 - a meticulous one-fifth scale model of his Korean family house crashed like an asteroid into a Boston apartment building – and Los Carpinteros' Show Room – a flat full of bombed Ikea furniture suspended Matrix-like at the moment of concatenation.

The highlight of the show, however, is Rachel Whiteread's breathtaking Place. Whiteread has stacked a room with over a hundred unfurnished dolls' houses, each of them twinkling in the darkness. The effect is of looming over a perfect Edward Scissorhands town that stretches off up a hill and into the far distance; it's simple, but incredibly moving, in the same way that crossing London Bridge on a night bus can be moving. Next year, perhaps Hayward director Ralph Rugoff should knock down the Hayward and let Whiteread build an entire little city in its place.

Psycho Buildings is at the Hayward until 25th August.