He documents iconic buildings by famous architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Kazuyo Sejima and Tatiana Bilbao in impressive images, photographs informal buildings and accompanies the growth of global megacities with his camera: Iwan Baan is regarded worldwide as one of the most important photographers of architecture and the built environment. From 21 October to 3 March 2024, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein is dedicating the first comprehensive retrospective to the Dutch photographer. The exhibition “Iwan Baan. Moments of Architecture” shows, according to the announcement, “with the photographer’s wide-ranging oeuvre, a panorama of the architecture of the early 21st century in its urban and social contexts, and the people who live in it”.
Baan works quickly and precisely. Today, images of new buildings are transmitted in real time, accompany the rise of architects, influence the design process and make architecture visually available anytime and anywhere. Hardly any other photographer has influenced this development as much as Iwan Baan. His focus on architecture goes back to an encounter with the architect Rem Koolhaas in 2004. The first part of the exhibition shows a series of images documenting two monumental projects in Beijing: the CCTV headquarters by Koolhaas’ office OMA (2002-2012) and the Olympic Stadium by Herzog & de Meuron (2003-2008). The exhibition presents footage from all areas of Baan’s work since the early 2000s, including film footage and lesser-known images of informal buildings, whether of a Chinese round village, an Ethiopian rock church or self-built multi-storey houses in Cairo. The second part of the show highlights the different perspectives from which Baan looks at buildings and urban space, spanning from Zaha Hadid’s “MAXXI Museum” in Rome to SANAA’s “Rolex Learning Center” in Lausanne and Toyo Ito’s “National Taichung Theatre” in Taiwan to Balkrishna Doshi’s projects in Ahmedabad. Other sections show the photographer as a chronicler of urban spaces. They are devoted to the development of cities and the ups and downs of the construction industry as well as to ways of life and living cultures that have often evolved over centuries. One of these projects documents what is presumably the world’s largest tent city, which comes into being every twelve years on the occasion of the Hindu festival “Kumbh Mela”, when around 50 to 80 million pilgrims flock to Prayagraj in India.
“The important thing is the storytelling,” says Iwan Baan. “And that is very intuitive and fluid. I’m less concerned with timeless images of great architecture than with the specific moment, the place and the people there – all the unforeseen, unplannable moments in and around a place, how people live there and what stories are told through it.”
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