We often like to talk about utopias, as a way to learn from the past and use that knowledge in our current projects and explorations. This time we're rediscovering Bernard Tschumi's proposal The Manhattan Transcripts. As he said: "Architecture is not simply about space and form, but also about event, action, and what happens in space."

We can read at Tschumi's description:

The Manhattan Transcripts differ from most architectural drawings insofar as they are neither real projects nor mere fantasies. Developed in the late '70s, they proposed to transcribe an architectural interpretation of reality. To this aim, they employed a particular structure involving photographs that either direct or "witness" events (some would call them "functions," others "programs"). At the same time, plans, sections, and diagrams outline spaces and indicate the movements of the different protagonists intruding into the architectural "stage set." The Transcripts' explicit purpose was to transcribe things normally removed from conventional architectural representation, namely the complex relationship between spaces and their use, between the set and the script, between "type" and "program," between objects and events. Their implicit purpose had to do with the 20th-century city.

The purpose of the Manhattan Transcripts was to transcribe an architectural interpretation of reality. It was divided in four sections: the park, the street, the tower and the block. Again from Tschumi's web-site:

The dominant theme of The Transcripts is a set of disjunctions among use, form, and social values; the non-coincidence between meaning and being, movement and space, man and object was the starting condition of the work. Yet the inevitable confrontation of these terms produced effects of far-ranging consequence. The Transcripts aimed to offer a different reading of architecture in which space, movement and events are independent, yet stand in a new relation to one another, so that the conventional components of architecture are broken down and rebuilt along different axes.

In "The Manhattan Transcripts", Tschumi was trying to use innovative cinematographic concepts like the notions of framing and sequencing in configuring his three basic elements of architecture: space, movement and events. We can see in these images that Tschumi was creating a juxtaposition of the three architectural elements and implemented a new kind of relationships among them that came from the cinematic experience.

While the programs used for The Manhattan Transcripts are of the most extreme nature, they also parallel the most common formula plot: the archetype of murder. Other phantasms were occasionally used to underline the fact that perhaps all architecture, rather than being about functional standards, is about love and death. By going beyond the conventional definition of use and program, The Transcripts used their tentative format to explore unlikely confrontations.

If you want to buy The Manhattan Transcripts book, there are some items available at Amazon [expensive ones]. Or you can go to Tschumi's website to know more about his old projects.