The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 4: The Block,
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
1980-81
A mixed-media architectural ‘transcript’ that uses ink diagrams and pasted black-and-white photographs to stage how movement, actions, and events animate urban space.
You first register thin, clinical line drawings floating on translucent tracing paper, and then a staccato sequence of four grainy photographs of running legs that turn the plans into a cinematic choreography of motion and collision.
Part of Tschumi’s influential Manhattan Transcripts, this work helped shift architecture toward narrativity and performance by treating plans as scripts of events, reshaping how designers consider program, movement, and social action in space.
Medium
Ink and cut-and-pasted gelatin silver photographs on tracing paper
Dimensions
19 x 31" (48.3 x 78.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Purchase and partial gift of the architect in honor of Lily Auchincloss
Accession
9.1995.3
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
