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

Bernard Tschumi

1979

An ink-on-tracing-paper sequence of architectural diagrams by Bernard Tschumi that stages a cinematic episode—“The Tower (The Fall)”—to test how events, movement, and human action can be read within and across plans and sections.

Vertically stacked, plan-like strips of precise, delicate lines punctuated by black solids, tilted blocky figures, and a dashed grid, so the sheet reads like a measured storyboard where ordered geometry collides with abrupt gesture.

Part of the Manhattan Transcripts series, this piece helped recast architecture as narrative and event, bringing filmic sequencing and diagrammatic storytelling into design and shaping later conceptual and deconstructivist practices.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Ink Drawing Plan drawing Section drawing Conceptual art Design

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