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 print from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts that pairs a photograph, a plan, and a schematic to show how bodies, events, and architectural elements interact, aiming to reconceive architecture as sequences of actions rather than static form.
You first notice the clinical triptych across a wide white field—left a grainy black-and-white photo of a pointing hand, center a crisp linear plan, and right a dashed diagram with sparse labels, each square numbered 1–3, like frames from a storyboard.
The Manhattan Transcripts reopened architecture to narrative and event, helping shift the discipline toward the choreography of movement and programmatic diagrams that would inform later narrative and deconstructivist practices.
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
3.1995.14
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
