Martino Stierli is MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, a role he assumed in March 2015. Stierli oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design.
He is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (2013). 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. At MoMA, he has curated the exhibitions Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (with Vladimir Kulić, 2018), Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (with Evangelos Kotsioris, 2021), and The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 (with Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson, 2022). Stierli also oversaw the installation of the new Architecture and Design collection galleries in the expanded MoMA, which opened in October 2019, and curated numerous collection installations.
Previous to joining MoMA, Stierli was the Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Art History. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia University, the universities of Zurich and Basel, EPF Lausanne, and ETH Zurich, from where he holds a PhD. In 2012, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His scholarship has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, including the ETH Medal of Distinction for Outstanding Research (2008), the Theodor Fischer Prize by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008), multiple publication and presentation grants from the Graham Foundation and the Swiss Art Award 2011 by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (for architectural criticism). His book Montage and the Metropolis was shortlisted for the 2018 Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association. The exhibition catalogue Toward a Concrete Utopia received the 2018 DAM Architecture Book Award by the German Architecture Museum, the 2019 Richard Schlagman Art Book Award in the category History of Architecture, and the 2021 Exhibition Catalogue Award by the Society of Architectural Historians.