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

Bernard Tschumi

1980

An ink-on-tracing-paper sheet from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (Episode 3: The Tower — The Fall) that stages architectural plans as a sequence of events to test how movement, action, and narrative rearrange architectural form.

The tall, narrow sheet reads like a precise, vertical comic: stacked horizontal bands of schematic, geometric motifs—tiny icons, dashed motion lines, and a single solid black strip—pull the eye down through repeated variations that suggest assembly, sequence, and a falling motion.

Part of a landmark series that reconceived drawings as scripts for events, this work helped shift architectural thinking toward program-as-performance and influenced later theoretical and deconstructivist practices by making movement and narrative central to design.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Ink Plan drawing Performance

Exhibitions

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

Three New Skyscrapers

1983

Architecture in Government Housing

1936

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

1960