Bernard Tschumi walks the audience through his Manhattan Transcripts. He points out commonalities through the different scales of the different drawings, and touches on formal expression, deconstruction, and the importance of drawing to express his ideas. Throughout, Tschumi continually links the drawings with his design philosophy.

Tschumi describes his attitude toward his work as an attempt to see architecture as a form of knowledge. He then describes his obsession with event and movement, insisting that they are pivotal in all his design decisions. Tschumi also introduces the Manhattan Transcripts, analyzing the first two parts as a way of explaining the drawings and ideas behind the work.

Tshumi describes Manhattan Transcripts in terms of notation usage, reciprocity, order and logic as a way of describing these sections of the Transcripts. Tschumi talks about the relevance of drawing, confluence and sequence, illustrated by the plans of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard.

Tschumi discusses the tower aspect of the Manhattan Transcripts. He describes the typical typology of a tower, and how his views tweak this type and organize it along different means and devices. He discusses form manipulations with regard to repetition, distortion, and scale differences.

Tschumi describes the manipulation of form, drawing, and associations of certain architectural designs. He also discusses frames as a system of order that manipulates meaning and defines space. Lastly, he talks about deconstruction, and his relation to its concepts and ideas.