in the 1960s, a small oppositional element in architecture forged its own counterculture by turning its energies away from building and towards writing. born of a desire to foreground the intellectual dimension of toward writing soon engaged architecture with broader questions of pop culture, mass media, advertising and emerging technologies.
architecture cannot be fully understood through two-dimensional representation. until experienced, architecture only exists within our imagination, from pictures and drawings. a person's desire to experience architecture comes from the idea displayed in a photograph or drawing, which advertises the building.
can words and images that do not relate to the building sell architecture in the same way?
tschumi explores the language of advertisements to discover if they can create the desire to see or to be inside a building. with reference to the strongest of human emotions, such as desire and fear tschumi provokes and intrigues as a method to explore the boundaries of architecture in the human psyche.
'it is not the clash between fragments of architecture that counts, but the invisible movement between them. desire.'
