TSCHUMI

Bernard Tschumi 
The Manhattan Transcripts
1976-1981

"Architecture is not simply about space and form, but also about event, action, and what happens in space. 

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."

http://www.tschumi.com/projects/18/

GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Conical Intersect.

"Completion through removal.

 Abstractions of surfaces. 

Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. 

Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces.

Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. 

Breaking and entering. 

Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse" 

- Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971

Best known for his large-scale “building cuts,” which radically altered architectural sites, Matta-Clark investigated space using a number of strategies and media.

He chopped up abandoned buildings, making huge, baroque cuts in them with chain saws, slicing and dicing like a chef peeling an orange or devising radish flowers. (The food analogy wasn’t lost on him.)

Splitting 

"To a plain single-family suburban frame house in Englewood, N.J , Matta-Clark made a cut straight down the middle, bisecting the building, then severing the four corners of the roof like so many trophy heads. It was spectacular but not quite like the times he sawed tear-shaped holes into floors of an office building in Antwerp, or conical openings into a pair of antique houses in Paris slated for demolition next to where the Pompidou Center was being built. What resulted were vertiginous, Piranesean spaces, uncannily beautiful and kinetic, preserved on film and in drawings and in collaged photographs that, as you can see in the show, are like Rubik’s cubes or Eschers." 

via The New York Times

The conical shape of the cuts has a strong resonance with the geometry of optics, 

perspective and image-making technology. Matta-Clark himself described the shape as a 

“spyglass,” through which to see things in new, secret ways.