The Project of Independence examines architectural thinking and practice beginning at a milestone date for the region, the Indian Independence Act of 1947, through the mid-1980s. The exhibition presents roughly 200 works across different architectural media, providing a cross section of architectural thinking and practice in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. Through this presentation, the works of the region’s architects—both famous and underrecognized—as well as their relationships to the global architectural community will be explored in depth. While the substantial impact of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn is well-known, this exhibition will focus on historical trajectories emanating from these figures while at the same time highlighting alternative models of architectural exploration and place-making.

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously as the Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Zurich’s Institute of Art History, Stierli focused his research on architecture and media. His scholarship has been recognized with a number of prizes, including the ETH Medal of Distinction for Outstanding Research (2008), the Theodor Fischer Prize by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich (2008), and the 2011 Swiss Art Award for Architectural Criticism. In 2012, Stierli was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Other notable works include : The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri (2014)—an entry in the 14th Architecture Biennale, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 (2018–19) and, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty (The Museum of Modern Art, 2019).

Sean Anderson is associate curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the UAE. As a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, his second book, In-Visible Colonies: Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea (Ashgate Publishing, 2015), was nominated for an AIFC Book Prize in Non-Fiction. At MoMA, he has organized the exhibitions Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016-17), Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-89 (2017-18), and manages the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, which includes the recent exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

Evangelos Kotsioris is currently a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, science, technology and media. Kotsioris graduated with first class honors from the AUTh School of Architecture and holds an MArch from Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research at Princeton School of Architecture has received a Carter Manny Citation for Special Recognition by the Graham Foundation. He was named the 2016–17 Emerging Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where he organized the exhibition Lab Cult: An Unorthodox History of Interchanges Between Science and Architecture. In 2015–16 he was the assistant curator of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial, Are We Human?

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