Martino Stierli, currently professor of modern architectural history at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich, has been named the newest Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
Stierli will take over his post next March, moving to the US from Switzerland. He will be succeeding Barry Bergdoll, who resigned from his post in 2013. Stierli will be managing a variety of programs which include exhibitions, installations and acquisitions of MOMA’s Department of Architecture and Design.
The new curator graduated with a degree in art, architectural history, German and comparative literature at the University of Zurich. After completing his MA in 2003, he worked with ETH Zurich under the graduate program “Urban Forms- Conditions and Consquences,” and received his Ph.D. in 2008. While working on his doctorate, he was also a visiting scholar at Columbian University in New York and at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the University of Zurich, he concentrated on the research of architecture, media, the photographic and cinematic representation of architecture and the city, the role of travel in architectural education, architectural devices of framing and display and the relationship of architecture and art. Stierli’s “The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri” was included at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. Stierlie also conducted a post-doctoral research at the National Center of Competence in Research at the University of Basel. He was also a 2012 Getty Research Institute fellow and has taught in several institutions and universities within Zurich and Basel.
Prior to his appointment at MoMA, Stierli has already received numerous awards including the ETH Medal of Distinction for Outstanding Research and the Theodor Fischer Prize by the Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte, Munich both in 2008 and the Swiss Art Award for Architectural Criticism in 2011.
