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

Bernard Tschumi

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.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Drawing Ink Architecture Plan drawing Avant-garde Contemporary art

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