The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 1: The Park

Bernard Tschumi

1976-77

A gelatin silver photograph from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts that pairs a photographed scene, a schematic plan, and a labeled map to propose architecture as a staged sequence of actions and places.

Three numbered square images float across a wide white field—a high-contrast photo of people’s legs and barbed wire, a precise line-drawn plan, and a dashed-outline box with place names—whose abrupt juxtapositions read like a choreography of movement and site.

This piece helped rewrite how architects represent space by combining photography, plan drawing, and text to treat buildings as settings for events, advancing diagrammatic and narrative methods that influenced later architectural theory and practice.

Palette

Art Terms

Gelatin silverprint (developing-out paper) Photography Architectural drawing Plan drawing Architecture Triptych Maps, borders,and networks

Exhibitions

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

Visionary Architecture

1960

Architecture and Imagery: Four New Buildings

1959

Architecture in the New York Area

1952