The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 4: The Block

Bernard Tschumi

1980-81

A sheet of ink drawings and black-and-white photographs on tracing paper in which Tschumi translates imagined movements and encounters across a Manhattan block into architectural diagrams and sequences.

You first notice a tidy grid of small, high-contrast photos—fragmented buildings, crowds, and cropped bodies—interrupted by dashed arrows and schematic loops that read like choreographic instructions mapped over the city.

Part of the influential Manhattan Transcripts, this work helped reframe architecture as the choreography of events and sequences rather than merely static form, opening design thinking to narrative, movement, and montage.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Choreography Ink Photography Montage Photomontage

Exhibitions

The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal

1967

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

1960

Visionary Architecture

1960

Thonet Furniture

1953