Site(s)

In a deliberate reference to Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts I reinterpreted five junctions along the alley in order to view them as smaller sites within the site. 

Sites within the alley...

Tschumi’s drawings read like a storyboard, the filmic quality heightened by the rhythm and motion of page turning.  The metropolis, with its familiar punctuations of park, street, tower and city block is an elaborate set piece that is fragmented beyond cartographic representation. 

Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts

The drawings make a claim on architectural discourse as an arena for abstract narrative – an idea I believe I am testing in my own thesis.  My assemblage of plan (1:100), photograph and drawing visualise new spaces within a familiar territory.

                Re-visualising the junctions...

The exercise also brought to mind Piranesi’s Carceri – that eerie collection of etchings that re-imagine a prison through distorted planes, scales and perspectives.  

Plate XIV from Piranesi's Carceri