As we cascade into a pixelated world navigable through panning, scrolling, and zooming, photographs have seized our attention, dominating the means by which we consume the built environment. They facilitate exploration, discourse, and debate, can frame engagement, and craft the narrative of architecture. Carefully controlled images can demand specific readings through the placement of figures, and arrangement of details and perspectives. Like a play, what we see is a choreographed version of reality.

The go-to creative for architects – and starchitects – the world over is Iwan Baan, a Dutch photographer extolled for capturing moments in the built environment. His international work was recently explored in an exhibition at the Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, alongside an accompanying catalogue with 600 of the photographer’s images.





The exhibition, Moments in Architecture, embraced Baan’s polemic approach, with a hang which dispelled the refined lines that marshal arrangements of photography in many galleries. There is a messiness and sense of chaos, with an implied ambivalence to the placement of works, though a result of great attention and care in the curation. Images sit flush to each other, were arranged at different heights, and were presented within forms that break the typical two-dimensional viewing plane.

Although challenging the viewer’s ability to read and understand a single image, this deconstructed language of curation is fresh and felt apt, offering a jumbled juxtaposition to the defined resolution within Baan’s photographic compositions. As an exercise in crafting an environment supportive of a specific kind of representation, this clever unsettling is inimitable, riffing off Baan’s approach and interest in the importance of subjects within fields of concrete matter.





A series of images catalogued under the label of China – sensibly, but perhaps a little prosaically – exemplifies Baan’s interest in happenings and undefined moments in the life that occurs around the spaces architects have designed. Beginning with a display of OMA’s CCTV building – Baan’s first major project, a foray initiated by a chance encounter with OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas – the photographer’s interest in the relationship between people and space is inescapable, his images capturing the process of the building’s construction, as the architectural elements come together, rather than its pristine finished state.

Through this, a layer of architecture often concealed in glossy representations has been made raw. His photographic focus is not on a perfect framing, the detailed meeting of materials, or an artful manipulation of light, instead, Baan captures the folds embedded within its creation – the lives of those that construct it, the material beneath the surface, the coordinated chaos responsible for bringing a building to life.




Ever the internationalist, perhaps mimicking the bold un-bordered ambitions of the many starchitects he often works for, Baan’s portfolio rejects locality. Presented across the exhibition of well-selected images, which provide a real sum of his oeuvre, are works located in China, Italy, the United States, and Burkina Faso – to name a few. Reflecting context, an evident pre-occupation of Baan, there is no stylistic concurrence between locations, though his imagery undoubtedly has a brand identity. This includes aerial views, which perhaps are the most repeated calling card – for which Baan favours the use of a helicopter, perhaps appropriate given the unapologetic environmental impact of the buildings he records.

Regardless, Baan’s photography proffers a unique snapshot, situating the built object into the urban grain – a rarity in the work of many of his contemporaries. Photographs of the Heydar Aliyev Centre by Zara Hadid Architects (2013) and Za Kōenji Public Theatre by Toyo Ito & Associates (2009) exemplify this awareness of urban context, illustrating the importance of positioning within a backdrop to the success of any piece of architecture.







Although varied, the biggest anomaly in Baan’s extended portfolio is his work with architect Diébédo Francis Kéré. Despite much of his photography stemming from expressions of controlled freedom – achieved through the presentation of highly-refined randomness – images capturing Kéré’s work feel more programmed, framed, and obviously deliberate, carrying more of a sense of Baan’s interest in architecture’s ability to shape the environment in which it sits. Images of Kéré’s buildings portray the intimate relationship between architecture, light, and shadows, allowing for a more explicit presentation of Baan’s ability behind the camera.

This appears to show a desire to record a different kind of architecture, one removed from the language of the starchitect. Alongside Kéré, Baan captures a vernacular indebted to an architecture that which is described on wall text as: “naturally evolving and adapting spaces that are as varied as the needs of their inhabitants.” The Vitra exhibition illustrated this approach well, drawing on a different mode of presentation which allowed the viewer to get physically closer to the image and its inhabitants, a shift from the scattered arrangement of images and high-resolution projections throughout the rooms. The display of Kéré’s work invited the viewer to lie down on one of the black plinths and look up at a screen suspended above, offering a feeling of total absorption.




Given the depth of his work, any commentary on Baan ultimately only scratches the surface. The exhibition and accompanying publication make a respected attempt to cover the range, through the harnessing of novel modes of representation and the sheer scale of the book. Neither claims to portray a full comprehension of Baan’s career, but there is real attempt to display what the Director of Vitra Design Museum, Mateo Kries, states in his text in the book: “an encyclopaedic panorama of global architecture in the early twenty-first century, of its urban and social context, and of the people that inhabit or use it.” In presenting the work across four themes – China, Perspectives, Cities and Continuities – and from the camera of a single author, an insightful snapshot is revealed.

As a photographer of the contemporary built environment, Iwan Baan is unquestionably a significant figure. Through his work, Baan looks to unsettle what it is to capture a moment in architecture, instead seeking to present the built environment as contextual to the life it supports. In producing images that present a narrative, rather than clean lines, sterile landscapes, and unoccupied perfection, Baan illustrates the power of architecture in facilitating chance encounters and allowing life to occur within urban forms.

For those unfamiliar with Baan’s work, an embrace of his ability to frame architecture, be that through his numerous publications or Moments in Architecture – which having now completed its presentation at Vitra is set to tour internationally – offers a unique opportunity to dispel the too often lauded and cleansed perfection of architectural photography. Baan offers an insight into beauty within chaos, the power of chance, and a need for architecture that is embracive and dependent upon the people who use it.