Montage and Metropolis:
Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space

by Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art 

The MAK Center was pleased to host a book release and panel discussion featuring author Martino Stierli, author and UC Irvine professor Ed Dimendberg,  USC associate professor Amy Murphy, art historian and UC Irvine professor Sally Stein, and architectural historian and Carleton University assistant professor Inderbir Riar.

Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern thought about cities and their architecture has never been adequately explored. In this groundbreaking new work, Martino Stierli charts the history of montage in late 19th‑century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early 20th‑century avant‑gardes, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. With chapters focusing on photomontage, the film theories of Sergei Eisenstein, Mies van der Rohe’s spatial experiments, and Rem Koolhaas’s use of literary montage in his seminal manifesto Delirious New York (1978), Stierli demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space, and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. Beautifully illustrated, this interdisciplinary book looks at architecture, photography, film, literature, and visual culture, featuring works by artists and architects including Mies, Koolhaas, Hannah Höch, Paul Citroen, George Grosz, El Lissitzky, and Le Corbusier.

Published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
ISBN: 978‑0‑300‑22131‑2 * Hardcover
320 pages * 72 color + 85 b/w illus.

martino stierli

Martino Stierli is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Martino oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. His exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 is currently on view at MoMA. In 2016, he co-curated, with Ann Temkin, the exhibition From the Collection: 1960-1969.

Martino is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013) and Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018). He has organized and co-curated exhibitions on a variety of topics, 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 in the Island of Capri, which was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014.