The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 3: The Tower (The Fall)
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
1979
An ink-on-tracing-paper panel from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts that stages a cinematic sequence—Episode 3, The Tower (The Fall)—to investigate how actions and events, not just walls and columns, produce architectural meaning.
Tall, vertical composition of stacked, storyboard-like horizontal strips: spare, precise lines, tiny geometric figures and arrows that progressively accumulate, fragment, and explode into a sudden black mass, making you read the drawing as movement over time.
Part of a groundbreaking series that transformed architectural drawing into a narrative and theoretical tool, Tschumi’s Transcripts helped shift architecture toward the analysis of events, program, and movement and anticipate deconstructivist approaches.
Medium
Ink on tracing paper
Dimensions
48 x 24" (121.9 x 61 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Purchase and partial gift of the architect in honor of Lily Auchincloss
Accession
7.1995.5
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions