Bernard Tschumi: The Manhattan Transcripts

“They found the Transcripts by accident… a lifetime’s worth of urban pleasures-pleasures that they had no intention of giving up. So when she threatened to run and tell the authorities, they had no alternative but to stop her. And that’s when the second accident occurred… the accident of murder…”
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The Manhattan Transcripts is a series of theoretical drawings created between 1976 and 1981 by Swiss-French architect and educator Bernard Tschumi (1944–). Through architectural drawings,it transcribes imagined events occurring at real locations in New York City,exploring the intermingled, dialogic, and contradictory overlaps among three dimensions: architectural space, human movement, and events. This forms the basis of notation as a creative methodology. This collector’s edition is a revised and expanded reprint accompanying the 1994 MoMA architectural exhibition Thresholds/Bernard Tschumi: Architecture and Event. It includes excerpts from Tschumi’s lecture series based on this series at the Architectural Association (AA) in London along with color plates.