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

Bernard Tschumi

1979

Ink-on-tracing-paper drawings that stage a cinematic sequence of plans and sections to explore how movement and an event (here, a fall) produces architectural experience.

A tall vertical sheet of repeated horizontal vignettes—spare, measured line work punctuated by solid black shapes and schematic figures—so that movement, collision, and circulation read like the choreography of a machine.

Part of Tschumi’s influential Manhattan Transcripts, this work helped reframe architecture as a record of events and actions, introducing cinematic and narrative strategies that broadened how buildings could be designed and represented.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Ink Plan drawing Section drawing Film Avant-garde

Exhibitions

Three New Skyscrapers

1983

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

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

1960

Architecture in Government Housing

1936