Martino Stierli: Montage et la Métropole

Although montage is considered one of the key structural principles of modern times, its importance for the history of modern thinking about cities and their architecture has never been adequately explored. In his lecture, Martino Stierli will attempt to outline the history of montage in urban and architectural contexts of the late 19th century, its use by avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 20th century, and its subsequent appropriation by postmodernism. Stierli, by examining photomontage, Sergei Eisenstein's film theory, Mies van der Rohe's spatial experiments, and the use of literary montage in the manifesto "Delirious New York" (1978, Czech 2007) by Rem Koolhaas, shows how the principle of montage is central to modern conquest of space and to the creation and embodiment of contemporary cities. We will together look at architecture, photography, film, literature, and visual culture, as well as examples from the works of artists and architects such as Mies, Koolhaas, Hannah Höch, Paul Citroen, George Grosz, El Lissitzky, and Le Corbusier.

Martino Stierli has served as the Chief Curator of the Architecture and Design Collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York since 2015. He oversees a diverse program of exhibitions and installations, as well as the acquisition of new works of art for the Architecture and Design section. Currently, you can see his exhibition "Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980," which he curated along with Vladimir Kulić. In 2016, he organized the exhibition "From the Collection: 1960-1969" together with Ann Temkin. Stierli is the author of the books "Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film" (Getty Research Institute, 2013), "Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space" (Yale University Press, 2018), and co-editor of the books "Participation in Art and Architecture" (I. B. Tauris, 2016) and "Before Publication: Montage in Art, Architecture, and Book Design" (Park Books, 2017). He has organized and co-organized several exhibitions, including the international traveling exhibition "Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown" and "The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas on the Island of Capri," which was part of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. Stierli received his PhD from ETH Zurich. Prior to joining MoMA, he served as a professor at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich. In 2012, he completed a research fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.