The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 2: The Street (Border Crossing)
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
1978
A long, cinematic collage—rendered in ink, charcoal, graphite, cut-and-pasted photographs, Letraset, and colored pencil on tracing paper—in which Bernard Tschumi sequences street scenes, bodies, and confrontations to insist that architecture is constituted by events and movement, not just form.
Seen in person it reads like a flattened filmstrip: translucent tracing layers, abrupt photographic inserts, repeated architectural fragments and figures set up a staccato rhythm of movement, collision, and spatial ambiguity across the work’s great length.
As part of the Manhattan Transcripts, this piece helped recast architectural drawing as a medium for narrating action and contradiction, influencing deconstructivist theory and opening new ways to represent how buildings and cities are produced by human behavior.
Medium
Ink, charcoal, graphite, cut-and-pasted photographic reproductions, Letraset type, and color pencil on tracing paper
Dimensions
24 x 322" (61 x 817.9 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Purchase and partial gift of the architect in honor of Lily Auchincloss
Accession
5.1995
Art Terms
Exhibitions
