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 stages a sequence—an aerial snapshot, a schematic plan, and a dashed contour—to investigate how events and movement produce architectural meaning.
Three square panels across a white field draw your eye from a grainy overhead photo of a prone figure to a crisp, diagrammatic plan and finally to a framed, dashed outline like a ghostly absence, so that presence and void are felt as parts of the same action.
Part of a seminal 1970s project that broke with static architectural representation by introducing narrative, filmic sequencing, and the primacy of events, the Transcripts reshaped how architects and theorists visualize and think about space and program.
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
3.1995.7
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
