The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York , Episode 4: The Block
Bernard Tschumi
French and Swiss, born Switzerland 1944
1980-81
An architectural collage in ink and cut-and-pasted gelatin silver photographs on tracing paper that stages cinematic sequences of distorted city fragments and a recurring human figure to argue that architecture is shaped by events and movement as well as form.
You first notice a comic-strip rhythm—the top row of small, warped urban vignettes, a middle band of abstract, plan-like outlines, and a lower photographic filmstrip of a silhouetted figure in repeated leaps that ties image and action together.
Part of Tschumi’s influential Manhattan Transcripts, this piece helped reframe architectural drawing as narrative and cinema-informed, opening the discipline to event-based and deconstructive modes of representation.
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
9.1995.5
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
