The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 3: The Tower (The Fall)

Bernard Tschumi

1979

An ink-on-tracing-paper architectural drawing from Bernard Tschumi’s 1979 Manhattan Transcripts that sequences diagrammatic ‘frames’ to stage actions—tilts, falls, and movements—arguing that events shape architecture as much as form.

Tall and vertical like a filmstrip, the sheet presents repeated rectilinear bands, a wavy line and a central dashed-plan, with crisp inked outlines and stark black panels that read as a choreographed progression of objects tipping, collapsing, and aligning.

Part of a radical project that shifted architecture toward narrative, choreography, and event, the Transcripts helped open the field to theoretical and deconstructive approaches that treat buildings as stages for human action rather than self-contained objects.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Ink Choreography Conceptual art Plan drawing

Exhibitions

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-Destroying Work of...

1960

Three New Skyscrapers

1983

Architecture in Government Housing

1936