Martino Stierli – författare

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, Paul Citroen, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, and Le Corbusier.

Casa Wabi, a nonprofit arts center located in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, is a stage for world-renowned contemporary artists and architects to engage with the local community.Tadao Ando's remarkable Casa Wabi dots the Pacific coastline of Mexico with structures by Alberto Kalach, Alvaro Siza, Kengo Kuma, Gloria Cabral, Solano Benitez, Jorge Ambrosi, and Gabriela Etchegaray. Founded in 2013 by renowned Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, it combines artist residencies, a gallery, and living quarters with classrooms, gardens, and public space.Tadao Ando centers the foundation on a 312-meter-long wall; his trademark concrete structures radiate off it, capped in woven palm tree leaves for ventilation. These local palapa-style roofs are often the only element distinguishing indoor and outdoor spaces, an effect complemented by wooden shutters in place of paned glass windows. Other unusual native building materials include Mexican parota wood and marmolina.Led by director Carla Sodi, Casa Wabi challenges architects and artists to contemplate nature deeply, as it provides new tools for area residents. Casa Wabi is both a world-class architectural destination and a model for newstrategies of creative intervention within economically depressed communities.

If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it?Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.

Does ‘participatory’ art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it?Shifting the ground of this debate, which tends to assume one or other direction of influence, this innovative book explores the inherently dialectic relationship between society and the built environment. At the same time, it strives for a historically conscious discussion of a very contemporary issue. Chapters rethink the top-down model of participation and audience activation of high modernism, from Alexander Dorner’s immersive museum to Mies van der Rohe’s ‘room(s) for play’; investigate participation in spaces under political pressure, from exhibitions in bombed-out buildings in besieged Sarajevo (1992-5) to the art and organizing of revolution in Egypt (2012-13); draw historical parallels between modes of participation and the exercise of power that are seldom compared with one another, from sites of occupation in 1968 Mexico and 2011 Spain; finally creating links between cartography and feminism and between tourism and internet surveillance.With these juxtapositions of the aesthetic and the everyday, and the built and the mediated, new questions arise: is space formed once and for all, or is it the changeable product of changeable patterns of use? Does the aesthetic always correspond to the political, or might an aesthetically authoritarian space be conducive to social justice? In exploring these questions, this book looks at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimised or liberated from it.

Over a period of forty years, Hélène Binet has photographed both contemporary and historical architecture – this is the complete monograph of her work, with two extensive critical essays. Marco Iuliano details Hélène Binet’s background, from her childhood in the Italian fishing village of Sperlonga and in Rome, through her early ‘discovery’ of architectural photographer Lucien Hervé, to other significant influences, like the collaborations with Daniel Libeskind, John Hejduk and the connections at the Architectural Association (AA) in London where she met Zaha Hadid. The essay highlights in detail Binet’s approach to photography, her process and archive.Martino Stierli sets Binet’s work within the conceptual framework of architectural photography, discussing whether an architectural photograph is an inventory of a building or space, a translation into a two-dimensional image or, rather, an image in its own right; an artifact that loosely relates to the original object or phenomenon. Within this context, Stierli argues that Binet’s oeuvre seems to oscillate between two obsessions: a desire to translate spatial phenomena into the two-dimensional space of the image and a quest to articulate the modulation of light on a surface. The two essays are followed by a catalogue of Binet's work, which is framed within a series of her recurring themes emerged through dialogues between the authors and the photographer.

At the moment of going to press, a publication irreversibly reaches its final form. Simultaneously, it also reaches an audience. Naturally, this audience very often is oblivious to the many, and sometimes complex, steps towards the construction and montage of (visual) meaning that precedes the actual publication of a book.The contributors to Before Publication consider such construction of meaning as montage and look at materials and processes involved before publication. Their focus is on concrete artistic and visual artifacts such as scrapbooks, book mock-ups, and press layouts by artists, authors, and graphic designers. In particular, they shed light on the relationship between the spheres of privacy and publicity.The new book features a programmatic introduction by the editors Nanni Baltzer and Martino Stierli and eight concisely illustrated topical essays.

Since it was first published in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas has become a classic in the theory of architecture and one of the most influential architecture texts of the 20th century. The treatise by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour enjoys a reputation as a signal work of postmodernism in architecture and urban planning. None of the book's editions have ever featured high-quality colour images the authors produced to illustrate their argument. Las Vegas Studio, originally published in hardback in 2008, was the first publication ever to present these significant photographs in large colour reproductions. Now available again in a new paperback edition, this unique book features 102 of these iconic images and film stills, alongside essays by Swiss scholars Stanislaus von Moos and Hans Ulrich Obrist exploring how the pictures contemplate the phenomenon of the modern city. Also included is a discussion with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Swiss artist Peter Fischli that speaks to the strong and lasting influence these images still have on contemporary art and movies.Also available:A Difficult Whole: A Reference Book on the Work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown ISBN 9783906027845

Since it was first published in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas has become a classic in the theory of architecture and one of the most influential architecture texts of the 20th century. The treatise by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour enjoys a reputation as a signal work of postmodernism in architecture and urban planning. None of the book's editions have ever featured high-quality colour images the authors produced to illustrate their argument. Las Vegas Studio, originally published in hardback in 2008, was the first publication ever to present these significant photographs in large colour reproductions. Now available again in a new paperback edition, this unique book features 102 of these iconic images and film stills, alongside essays by Swiss scholars Stanislaus von Moos and Hans Ulrich Obrist exploring how the pictures contemplate the phenomenon of the modern city. Also included is a discussion with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Swiss artist Peter Fischli that speaks to the strong and lasting influence these images still have on contemporary art and movies.Text in French.