In explaining his Manhattan Transcripts, a series of drawings from 1976-81 that drew heavily from cinema, the architect Bernard Tschumi declared that “there is no architecture without event”. Tschumi credited filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as his greatest influences, and saw in architecture a "disjunction between use, form and social values" that underpinned his examinations of "space, movement and event" and their intertwinements in, and between, film and architecture.

Manhattan Transcripts was a product of its time and place — the noir New York of the 1970s and '80s. Now, a half century later, we move to Mumbai and ask: What relationships between space, movement and event can we glean from this metropolis in the 21st century? How might architecture address the disjunction between use, form and social values to articulate, create and encourage (or discourage) new forms of social relations? We invite you to propose a pavilion or spatial installation in which the visitors simultaneously become actors, protagonists and audience, and where their encounters with your design and each other become sites of new narratives for our current social, cultural and ecological condition.