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 that stages three numbered panels—a candid photograph alongside schematic diagrams—to translate actions and encounters in a city park into an architectural narrative.
You notice immediately the sharp contrast between the grainy, intimate black-and-white snapshot of a hand on an arm and the cold, mechanical line drawings beside it, arranged as a terse, diagrammatic sequence numbered 1–3.
Part of Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, this piece helped reframe architecture as a choreography of events rather than only forms, pioneering the use of photographic sequences and diagrams to represent movement, chance, and bodily experience in space.
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
3.1995.23
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
