The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi

The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard TschumiThe Manhattan Transcripts proposed to show an architectural understanding of reality. Each grade Tschumi aims to get across, is made by a series of three public squ atomic number 18 panels, where dashs direct the action, plans, sections, etc. reveal the architectural construct, and diagrams indicate the impetuss of the main characters. The Transcripts be first and foremost a device with their explicit purpose world to transcribe things norm tout ensembley removed from conventional architectural archetype, namely the coordination compound alliance betwixt stations and their use amidst the tick and the script between type and program between objects and numbers. Their implicit purpose has to do with the twentieth-century city. The Transcripts approximate to offer a distinguishable reading of computer architecture in which pose, forepart, and resolutions are separate, al whizz standing in a sensitive relationship with superstarness a nonher. This is meant to break spile and rebuild the standard components of architecture along antithetic axes. Tschumi takes the Manhattan Transcripts program to figure of speechulate a plot based around a executing.MT 1 (Manhattan Transcripts 1) The Park is the first episode composed of cardinal four sheets illustrating the drawn and photographed line of a murder. The formula plot of the murder the lone figure stalking its victim, the murder, the hunt, the search for clues building up to the murderers capture. plot the origin of MT 1 is in New Yorks Central Park, MT 2 The Street (Border Crossing) is based on forty-second street, from the Hudson to the East River. in that respect are over a dozen different experiences along 42nd street by MT 2 does not exist these worlds, precisely the borders that describe them. Each border becomes a space with the events that it contains, with the travails that transgress it.In MT 3 The Tower (The Fall) This program proposes to highlight the fall of mortal inside a common denominator like a home, office, prison, hotel or asylum. The set of draftsmanships portrays manyones flight and the preceding fall through the full height of a Manhattan tower block, its cells and its yards. The drastic interchange of perceptions ca utilize by the fall is used to style for different spatial transformations and their typological distortions.In MT 4 The closure describes quintette inner courtyards of a simple city block witness hostile events and programmatic impossibilities acrobats, ice-skaters, dancers, soldiers, and football players all congregate and perform high-wire acts, games, or even the re-enactment of famed battles, in a context usually alien to their activity. Disjunctions between movements, programs, and spaces of necessity follow as for each(prenominal) one pursues a distinct logic, small-arm their confrontations get the most unlikely combinations.The Transcripts present three dis joined levels of reality at the same cartridge clip (i) The world of objects, composed of buildings absentminded from maps, plans, photographs (ii) The world of movements, which clear be bring uped from choreography, sport, or other movement diagrams and (iii) The world of events, which is abstracted from news photographs. At first, the importance of each level depends only on how each is interpreted by the viewer, since each level give the sack eer be seen against the background of another. It appears to be the Transcripts argument that only the striking relationship between the three levels makes for the architectural experience. So entangled are these levels with one another that at any moment they are perfectly interchangeable. make the Transcripts never attempt to rise above contradictions between object, man and event in order to bring them to a new synthesis but instead, they aim to maintain these contradictions in a dynamic manner. Tschumi states, In their one-on-on e state, objects, movement, events are simply discontinuous. Only when they unite do they establish an indorsement of continuity. Such disjunction implies a dynamic conception posed against a static definition of architecture, an excessive movement that brings architecture to its limits. Tschumis purpose of the three-party mode of notation (events, movements, spaces) was to introduce the order of experience and the order of time (moments, intervals, sequences) for all inevitably intervene in the reading of the city.It is too seen as a need to question the modes of representation generally used by architects plans, sections, axonometrics and perspectives. The insertion of movement into the overall architectural scheme meant that Tschumi had to breaking raven whatsoever of the traditional components of architecture which permitted the independent use of each new part according to narrative or formal considerations. For example, the plans of the Park, the section of the Street, t he axonometrics of the Tower, the perspectives of the Block all follow (and sometimes question) the internal logic of their modes of representation. The compositional implications of an axonometric (an abstract projection according to the rules of descriptive geometry) are, as a result, widely different from those of a perspective with a single vanishing point. A particular matter is explored in the forth episode of the Transcripts. As opposed to the plans, maps, or axonometrics used in the early episodes, the perspectival description of buildings is concomitant with their photographic record the photograph acts as the origin of the architectural cypher. The perspective image is no long-life a mode of three dimensional drawing, but the direct backstage of the photographic mode of perception. The same applies to the movement notation. An extension from the drawn conventions of choreography, it attempts to draw the preconceived meanings given to particular actions so as to concen trate on their spatial effects the movement of bodies in space. The early MTs introduce the estimate of movement in general by freely improvising movement patterns, from the fugitives to the street-fighters. The ultimately MT analyzes highly formalised movement diagrams of dancers, football players, skaters, army tacticians and acrobats. sort of than merely indicating directional arrows on neutral surface, the logic of movement notation ultimately suggests real corridors of space, as if the dancer had been carving space taboo of pliable substance or the reverse, shaping continuous volumes , as if a whole movement had been literally solidified, frozen into a permanent and extensive vector. Each event with in the Transcripts is represented by a photo, in an attempt to get to get the viewer closer to an objectivity which is ofttimes missing from architectural programs.Tschumi describes the Manhattan Transcripts as not an accumulation of events they display a particular organisatio n. Their chief characteristic is the sequence, a composite chronological sequence of lays that confronts spaces, movement, and events, each with its own structure and inherent set of rules. The narratives implied by these composite sequences may be linear, deconstructed, or dissociated. MT 1 is linear, while MT 2 only appears to be so MT 3 depicts two unrelated moments, while MT 4 exhausts the narrative, meaning it deconstructs programs in the same direction that it deconstructs forms and movements. The Transcripts share a similarity to aims. Both share a skeleton by frame technique, spaces are not only composed, but it is in like manner developed from shot to shot so that the last(a) meaning of each shot depends on its context. The relationship of one frame to the next is congenital insofar as no analysis of any one frame can accurately reveal how the space was handled altogether. The Transcripts are thus not self-contained images. They establish a memory of the preceding frame, of the course of events. Their final meaning is cumulative it does not depend merely on a single frame (such as a facade), but on succession of frames or spaces. In any case, the Transcripts al government agencys display at to the lowest degree two conflicting fields first, the framing device square, healthy, conformist, normal and predictable, fixture and comforting, correct. Second, the framed material, a jell that only questions, distorts, compresses, displaces. Both are infallible. incomplete is inherently special neither communicates by itself. It is the play between them that does their blank space and its occasional transgression, when the frame itself becomes the object of distortions. The frame permits the extreme formal manipulation of the sequence, for the content or congenial frames can be mixed up, superposed, worn in, cut up, giving endless possibilities to the narrative sequence. The last Transcript eliminates all that is inessential to the architectur e of the city. Spaces, movements, events are contracted into only fragments absolutely necessary to outline the overall structure. Since each frame is isolated from the next, architecture can begin to act as a series of surprises, a form of architectural jump-cut, where space is carefully broken apart and then reassembled at the limits.Tschumi records his classification of a number of words two of them stand out, while researching the Manhattan TranscriptsEvent an incident, an occurrence a particular item in a programme. Events can encompass particular uses, singular functions or isolated activities. They overwhelm moments of passion, acts of love and the instant of death. Events have an independent existence. Rarely are they rigorously the consequence of their surroundings. In literature, they belong to the category of the narrative (as opposed to the descriptive). trend the action or process of moving (In a poem or narrative progress or incidents, development of a plot). Also th e inescapable intrusion of bodies into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a building an act that violates the equilibrium of a precisely ordered geometry (do architectural photographs ever include runners, fighters, lovers?) bodies that carve unexpected spaces through their fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an beingness passively employed in constant intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought.In the early days of developing and drawing The Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi arrived at the tripartite notation of space, event, and movement and literally introduced the idea of movement as a separate term in the equation. Tschumis first hypothesis was that architecture begins with movement. For example, one enters a building, one passes through it, one climbs stairs, one goes from one space to another, and that network of routes being what really forms architecture. Even through architectur e can be made of static spaces, the interaction between the static and the dynamic is what really constitutes it. This allowed Tschumi to take the argument to the next level and introduce and advance the notion of program, and then at a by and by stage to develop it more precisely. Traditional means of architectural representation (plans, sections, perspectives, axonometrics) have a number of limitations. Tschumi believed the idea of the event which evolved out of his divinatory work couldnt be represented through these means. But it had been extensively attested in other disciplines such as dance, certain sports, and film theory, as well as in the work of a number of cognitive process artists.Artist like Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman and Bruce McLean, all show an extensive representation of events and movement within their work. In the 1970s, Dan Graham worked with performance, film and video to explore changes in individual and group consciousness and the limits of private and publi c space. His video surveillance Time Delay and Present and continuous Past(s) installations create an event space that transforms the audience into part of the performance while also allowing interaction with the performer. The film Body Press show two filmmakers standing within a completely reverberateed surrounding, without moving their bodies, hands holding and pressing a cameras back-end flush to, while slowly rotating it about, the surface cylinder of their individual bodies. genius rotation goes around the bodys contour, spiralling slightly upwards with the next turn. This continues up and down the body and then the camera is exchanged and the process repeated. The cameras film the image reflected on the mirror, the body of the performer and possibly his eyes on the mirror. This movement of the camera tries to act or be seen as an extension of the bodys identity. The events created through the experience of his work are further highlighted through his built forms. The archi tecture of Dan Grahams own pavilions acknowledges the fantasy of the significance of the viewer in a space in culture. His structures are precisely designed for specific situations. People debut or observing them are able to look at these situations and their place within them. Any change in the lighting provokes a change in the relative reflectivity or transparency of the pavilions two-way mirror glass, putting the relationships between people and their surroundings into constant flux. People look at nature, at themselves superimposed on it, at others looking at them, at others looking at others looking at them an endless equivalence directed at the possibility of acute social (self) consciousnessIn the 1970s, Bruce McLean changed the medium of his natural mode of expressive performance, from art, to live performance and pose. On his return to painting, the experience played a big role is his after work. He made a series of large works on paper inspired by some magazine photograp hs of Chinese acrobats. These were extremely simple and direct but where the first to exploit the possibilities of emblematic colour in relation to political symbolism. The acrobats of politics were depicted as engaged in their self-absorbed feats in arenas of performance suspiciously uncomplicated, against backgrounds that signified, in the way that flags do, certainties of value and allegiance such certainties came in different colours. Even though simple these paintings expressed movement across a plane and the idea of event, a space where this movement is being enjoyed. Among many which represent some form of event and movement, McLeans Ambre Solaire painting highlights how well this medium captures the movement and activity. Presented on a black background with neon orange figures and brushed bodies in bronze, the light green and white that represent the splash, perfectly brings it to life. It feels bright and inviting.The Transcripts represent a collects of drawings which pr oposed a new way of architectural interpretations. These try to also propose new ways to present movement and event. The Transcript achieves this is some areas, the event is only clearly represented within the photographs but go bad to be clear within the drawings. Some photos also dont give a clear idea of the scene proposed. Where as representation of movement and event highlighted by the artist Dan Graham and Bruce McLean show with little interpretation what the main goal they are trying to present. The Manhattan Transcripts do portray is interesting and rum way for looking at a set of drawings with a precise interesting program to follow which is hard to tie together but enjoyable to research.