In the 1960s, a small oppositional element in architecture forged its own countercultureby turning its energies away from building toward writing. Born of a desire to foregroundthe intellectual dimension of architecture by associating it with developments in conceptualart,linguistics, and philosophy, this turn toward writing soon engaged architecture withbroader questions of pop culture, mass media, advertising, and emerging technologies.

During this period, avant-garde theorist and architect BERNARD TSCHUMI created “Advertisements for Architecture”, a series of postcard-sized juxtapositions of words and images, based on the idea that most of us experience architecture through photographs, drawings and words in books, in other words, through our imagination and not through the experience of real space.

There is no way to perform architecture in a book. Words and drawings can only produce paper space, not the experience of real space. By definition, paper space is imaginary: it is an image.

So he makes a comparison of the way that advertisements show you the same image over and over to create a desire for something that exists beyond the two dimensional page: “as there are advertisements for architectural products, why not for the production (and reproduction) of architecture?” TSCHUMI wants to see if the language of advertisements can create the desire to see or to be inside the building. The first two ads are from Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoy of 1965 which was in a state of decay at that point, and was soon to be restored.

via we find wildness