Publication

  • Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space
    Martino Stierli
    Author
    Yale University Press, 2018
  • GRANTEE
    Martino Stierli
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Convention Hall Project, preliminary version: interior perspective, 1950, Chicago, IL. Photomontage (delineator: Edward Duckett, MvdR office). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

This book explores the relevance of the concept of montage for architectural discourse and the conceptualization of modern space in the twentieth century. It is guided by the notion that montage constitutes a central operation for architectural production in modernity, and understands montage as a procedure for the production of meaning based on juxtaposition and re-assembly. The study focuses mainly on the historical avant-gardes of the early-twentieth century, including Mies van der Rohe, Sergei Eisenstein, and El Lissitzky, but also relates to the present with a case study on Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York. It also discusses the application of both photomontage and cinematic concepts of montage in visual architectural discourse. Pursuing both historical and theoretical arguments, the book seeks to expand current scholarship on the relationship of architecture and media as well as the intersection of architecture and visuality.

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Previously, he held a SNSF Professorship at the University of Zürich. Stierli is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013) and coeditor of Participation in Art and Architecture (I. B. Tauris, 2016). He is the cocurator of the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. His scholarship has been recognized with a number of prizes and awards, among them the ETH Medal of Distinction and the Theodor Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008). In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.