Martino Stierli

Museum of Modern Art curator Martino Stierli, in an interview at World-Architects that I edited ahead of the opening of The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, described that exhibition as "a continuation of the 2018 exhibition, Toward A Concrete Utopia," subtitled Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 and notably his first major show at MoMA. Stierli actually proposed the exhibition on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka in his 2014 interview for the MoMA post, a clear sign that he sees the contemporary importance in "destabilizing the Western-centric canon of modern architectural history," one notably fostered by MoMA for decades. The catalog is as good as the exhibition was, with a portfolio of contemporary photographs by Randhir Singh, essays by architects and scholars (on cities, housing, infrastructure, education, and other subjects), and case studies on more than a dozen buildings, from Antonin Raymond' s Golconde dormitory in Pondicherry, India, to Yasmeen Lari's Anguri Bagh Housing in Lahore, Pakistan. As befits Stierli, an architectural historian, the catalog is more thorough and wide-ranging than the exhibition it accompanied.… (mehr)

Martino Stierli, now the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, wrote his PhD dissertation on "Learning from Las Vegas." Published in German by gta Verlag in 2010, "Las Vegas im Rückspiegel" was translated into English three years later and published by the Getty. As the subtitle of "Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror" makes clear, Stierli focuses on how the 1972 book theorizes the city through photography and film. While the photography of the Yale studio in Las Vegas is well known, the use of film is less familiar to people. (There are dozens, if not hundreds of photos in "Learning from Las Vegas," but there is only one spread with a film strip.) But film was an integral part of both documenting and analyzing the Las Vegas Strip for LLV. After all, what better way to capture the ever-changing views from a car's windshield as it traverses the Strip than a movie camera? Film is surely not the sole media that Stierli discusses, but it is further evidence of the groundbreaking nature of the original book. In the hands of Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, and their students, photography and film were the media ideally suited to the reality of the Strip as a very American space that needed to be understood and interpreted.… (mehr)