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 triptych from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts that pairs a photographed action with architectural plans and diagrams to investigate how events and movement shape urban space.
Three numbered square panels read like film frames—a grainy black-and-white photograph of a man, a tightly detailed plan-like drawing, and an abstracted diagram—aligned to convert architectural representation into a temporal sequence.
A seminal work in 1970s architecture, it helped shift practice and theory toward seeing buildings as stages for actions by fusing cinematic, photographic, and diagrammatic modes to argue that events, not just forms, produce architectural meaning.
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
3.1995.22
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
