The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 1: The Park
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
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.
Medium
Gelatin silver photograph
Dimensions
14 x 18" (35.6 x 45.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Purchase and partial gift of the architect in honor of Lily Auchincloss
Accession
3.1995.11
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions