Bernard Tschumi: The Manhattan Transcripts

“They found the Transcripts by accident... a lifetime's worth of urban 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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Bernard Tschumi: The Manhattan Transcripts are a series of theoretical drawings created between 1976 and 1981 by the Swiss/French architect and educator Bernard Tschumi, 1944. Through architectural drawings, it transcribes imagined events that take place in a real New York location, exploring three overlapping, conversational, and contradictory levels of architectural space, human movement, and events that form the basis of Notation as a creative method. The collection is part of the 1994 special architectural exhibition “Beginning/Bernard Tschumi: Architecture and Event” at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), accompanied by a revised edition of the collection at the Architectural Union Academy (AA) in London. An excerpt of the keynote lecture, accompanied by a colored graphic version.