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

Bernard Tschumi

1979

An ink-on-tracing-paper sheet from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts that stages a series of schematic, cinematic tableaux to investigate how movement, events, and program animate an imagined tower.

You read it like a measured filmstrip—vertical grids of small square vignettes with spare line drawings on the left balanced against high-contrast black-filled counterparts on the right, the repetition and cutaways turning plan and section into a sequence of enacted moments.

Part of a landmark series that reconceived architectural drawing as narrative and choreography, this work helped shift the discipline toward thinking of space as produced by events and actions, influencing later conceptual and deconstructivist practices.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Ink Choreography Conceptual art

Exhibitions

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

Architecture in Government Housing

1936

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

1960

Three New Skyscrapers

1983