A pitched roof, a little window and a doorway; the façade of the Barbican's "Surreal House" is pretty average looking. It's only when you reach for the doorbell and find your finger on the nipple of a foam breast (Marcel Duchamp's Prière de Toucher) that you sense things might be a little off-centre inside.

The Surreal House is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between surrealism and architecture. Presenting 170 works within a maze of 16 rooms, "The Surreal House" "is home to the irrational made real, illuminations of the banal everyday… in short, it is everything the modernist home is not," explains the exhibition's curator Jane Alison, gesturing to the doorway.

Downstairs, the focus is on domestic interior space. First is the bathroom, where Rachel Whiteread's imposing, tomb-like Black Bath welcomes visitors. Next door, at the epicentre of this labyrinth, Sigmund Freud's anthropomorphic consulting chair – designed to support each contour of his body – watches on from an elevated plinth, as if to ensure the domestic surroundings are as fragmented, tortured and unstable as he proclaimed them to be.

An almighty crash draws me into the living room. Rebecca Horn's Concert for Anarchy – a ghosted grand piano suspended from the ceiling – has just puked out its innards, and I arrive to find its keys hanging from its body, casting the shadow of a magnificent castle on the wall. In the hallway behind, Louise Bourgeois' No Exit staircase leads to nowhere. The cellar, represented by Jan Švankmajer's film Down to the Cellar, is as you'd expect, haunted. And down a dimly lit passageway, someone is hiding behind The Toilet in the Corner (by Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov) singing opera.

On this floor, the house is representative of the fragile, fragmented self. This is most poignant in the corridors and in-between spaces, where we see work by artists occupied with what home is, and their place within in. For Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere, the house is simply a blanket, wrapped around a woman. Artist Donald Rodney portrays the house as his very own skin with his miniscule In the House of My Father model, while Bourgeois' Femme Maison series is a study on domesticity, as seen in her half-house, half-naked woman figure.

Upstairs, the labyrinth continues but the focus shifts to surrealism's influence on architecture, through a series of "chance encounters". Salvador Dalí's iconic painting Sleep – a giant disjointed head wobbling precariously on crutches – is placed next to a film of Office for Metropolitan Architecture's Villa dall'Ava in France. We're to see OMA's building, teetering on plinths, as a contemporary reflection of Dalí's painting. Le Corbusier is also well represented. His outdoor living room for Charles de Bestegui reveal his surrealist influences. Even Corbusier's Villa Savoye – the token house of twentieth century modernism – takes on an eerie, surreal quality, courtesy of René Burri's photographs of the building's disrepair.

But in focusing on the unexpected influences, the exhibition forgets some of today's more obvious contenders. Gordon Matta-Clark is represented with Splitting (a house split in two) but this is the only piece. London architectural practice FAT didn't get a mention, despite a portfolio of work that veers towards the surreal, and more recent interventions, such as British installation artist Richard Wilson's Turning the Place Over (an eight metre ovoid cut from the façade of a building and made to oscillate) are underrepresented. Downstairs, a similar tendency towards the surprising over the expected saw the exclusion of the surrealists' furniture – there was no Lobster Telephone or Mae West Lips sofa by Dalí, or Table with Bird Legs by Meret Oppenheim. It's a pity not to see these works in such a fitting context.

But ultimately, what is most spectacular about "The Surreal House" is the experience of stumbling through the corridors, getting a bit lost, being surprised, frightened, and experiencing that quality Louis Aragon defined as the marvelous; that which turns the world upside down. Anna Bates