The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 4: The Block
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
1980-81
A sheet from Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts combining ink drawings and cut-and-pasted gelatin silver photographs on tracing paper to stage sequences of movement and events against architectural fragments and ask how actions, not just forms, make space.
The piece reads like a film storyboard: a top row of schematic, windowed elevations, a middle register of abstract plan-like mechanisms, and a bottom row of repeated close-up silver prints of feet and legs, the precise black ink on translucent tracing paper set against the tactile grain of the photographs.
The Transcripts helped recast architecture as choreography and narrative—an influential move in architectural theory and the deconstructivist shift that insisted plans must account for events, movement, and human occupation rather than only formal composition.
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
9.1995.4
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
