Review: Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space, by Martino Stierli

Abstract

Martino Stierli Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018, 320 pp., 72 color and 85 b/w illus. $60 (cloth), ISBN 9780300221312 Both instrumental technique and potentially radical political critique, montage occupies a crucial place within architectural culture. From August Schmarsow to Manfredo Tafuri, Le Corbusier to Colin Rowe, a wide array of architects, theorists, and historians have used montage while seeking to comprehend and reshape modern urban space. El Lissitzky's 1924–25 Wolkenbugel (Cloud Hanger) is a paradigmatic example (Figure 1). The term montage refers generally to a technique involving the synthetic spatial and temporal arrangement of image fragments, whether from still photography or moving pictures. It is difficult to pin down, however: while constructed primarily from photographic fragments, montage imbricates multiple media, as evidenced by its centrality to cinematic discourse. Its importance to the formation of modernism is indisputable, and alongside collage and assemblage, montage remains a paradigmatic type of modern image making charged with the symbolic representation of twentieth-century experience. Figure 1 El Lissitzky, Wolkenbugel, 1924–25, photomontage. In Montage and the Metropolis , Martino Stierli demonstrates that montage served as twentieth-century modernity's “symbolic form.” Echoing Erwin Panofsky, Stierli argues for montage as the visual schema par excellence through which the mobile and fragmented heterogeneity of modernist production supersedes the monocular spatial continuity of Renaissance art. As such, it is a cultural technique capable of representing the traumas inflicted on the metropolitan subject by modernity and of reconciling that subject to the modern world. In his introductory chapter, Stierli defines montage according to five characteristics. The first three concern montage's formal properties and their relationship to a viewing subject. First, montage produces representations through the spatial or temporal juxtaposition of fragmentary images; meaning is produced through the active participation of the viewer who apprehends them. Second, montage operates spatially, ordering the disordered world upon the image surface. Third, it presupposes a mobile observer whose embodied perception generates a polyfocal and antiperspectival view of …