Modernisms Research Workshop

“The Visuality of Space and the Space of Vision: On Mies van der Rohe’s Photomontages”

This talk addresses photomontage as a quintessential modern means of representation, as well as Mies’s research on a new conception of space, and how photomontage serves as a tool of investigation in that respect.

Martino Stierli is the new Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Before coming to MoMA in March of 2015, Stierli was the Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the Institute of Art History of the University of Zurich, where he taught the history of modern architecture. In his new role, he oversees the Department of Architecture and Design’s wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations from the collection, and acquisitions.
Stierli’s research focuses on architecture and media, the photographic and cinematic representation of architecture and the city, the intersection of architecture and art, the genealogy of postmodernism, the transatlantic exchange in postwar and postmodern architecture, and modernism in Latin America. His project The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014.
Stierli studied art and architectural history, German, and comparative literature at the University of Zurich, where he received his M.A. in 2003 and his PhD in 2008. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and at Columbia University in New York. In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Mr. Stierli taught at various Swiss universities, including the universities of Zurich and Basel, as well as ETH Zurich before being appointed to his current post.
His first monograph, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film, was published in 2010, the English edition of which was published in 2013 with the Getty Research Institute. He also authored a book on Robert Venturi’s two-year tenure at the American Academy in Rome in the mid-1950s, and has published a large number of essays on various topics.