AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Pictures that show buildings together with the people who use them and the city or landscape around them, often seen from a helicopter
- Works in
- Color
- Camera
- One light, handheld 35mm digital Canon. No tripod
- Also
- Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale for the Torre David project; first Julius Shulman Photography Award (2010)
- Start with
- Iwan Baan: Moments in Architecture (Vitra Design Museum, 2023)
- Links
Iwan Baan (born 1975) is a Dutch photographer of architecture and the built environment. He is known for pictures that show buildings together with the people who use them and the places around them. Since meeting Rem Koolhaas in 2004, he has photographed buildings by many of the world’s leading architects, and also the homes people build for themselves.
The story
In 2005 Iwan Baan went to Beijing with the architect Rem Koolhaas. Before that, he had only passed through China in transit. Koolhaas’s huge CCTV headquarters was just going into construction, and Baan was there “from the very beginning, when they just started digging the foundation.”
What struck him most was not the design. It was the people. Migrant workers from all over rural China lived on the site, at times 10,000 of them. They worked, rested, ate and watched TV there, around the clock. “They were building this grand, technologically advanced building, but the way they did it was largely by hand,” he said.
Architecture was still new to him. Born in 1975 in Alkmaar, in the Netherlands, he got his first camera, an Agfa Clack, from his grandmother for his twelfth birthday. He studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and worked as a documentary photographer in Amsterdam and New York. Late in 2004 he met Koolhaas, who asked him to photograph new buildings such as the Seattle Public Library and the Casa da Música in Porto. “That was my introduction to architecture; I had no clue about it at the time.”
But Koolhaas liked the stories in his pictures. So Baan proposed to record the whole CCTV project, from start to finish. Every six to eight weeks he went back, for a few years. Because he was in Beijing so often, he also asked Herzog & de Meuron if he could document their Olympic Stadium, the Bird’s Nest.
The way of working stayed with him. One light camera, no tripod, and a lot of time with the people around a building. In 2012 he shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for a series on Torre David, an unfinished tower in Caracas where families had made their homes.
In China he later documented the construction of the Harbin Opera House by MAD Architects. It was finished at the end of 2015. A few weeks later Baan came back in deep winter, when temperatures fell to about minus 30 degrees Celsius and the city was full of visitors for its ice and snow festival.
About ten years earlier, the people in his Beijing pictures were building. Now they walked through the finished halls. “My pictures are always very much about the users of the place,” he says.
The work
- 1975Born in Alkmaar, the Netherlands
- 1987Gets his first camera, an Agfa Clack, from his grandmother for his twelfth birthday
- 2004Meets Rem Koolhaas and starts photographing architecture
- 2005Begins documenting the construction of the CCTV headquarters in Beijing
- 2010Wins the first Julius Shulman Photography Award. Brasilia – Chandigarh is published
- 2012Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for Torre David. His Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy is on the cover of New York Magazine
- 201352 Weeks, 52 Cities opens at MARTa Herford
- 2016Receives the AIA New York Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award
- 2023First major retrospective, Moments in Architecture, at the Vitra Design Museum
Lessons
Step back from the building. For many shoots he rents a helicopter. A view from above shows where a building stands, so it is not just a building that could be anywhere.
Keep coming back. He visited the CCTV site every six to eight weeks for years. Over time the pictures became a story of a city changing.
Travel light. He usually takes only one camera and never uses a tripod. That lets him follow life as it happens.
Try this: find a building near you that is being built or changed. Visit it every two weeks for three months with one camera and no tripod. Photograph the people who work there or use it. On your last visit, make one wide picture from the highest point you can safely reach.
Gear
Baan works very light. He usually wants only one camera with him, and he does not use tripods or large cameras.
Handheld digital camera: his main tool is a 35mm digital Canon, held by hand. New sensors let him photograph in almost complete darkness, even by candlelight.
Canon EOS-1D X: he used it with a 24-70mm lens for his picture of Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, at ISO 25,000 and 1/40 second, from the open door of a helicopter about 5,000 feet up.
Helicopter: he rents one for most shoots, to show a building in its city or landscape.
He does very little post-production, mostly color correction, and always right after the shoot.
Books
Iwan Baan: Moments in Architecture (Vitra Design Museum, 2023). Made for his first large retrospective, at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein in autumn 2023. Edited by Mateo Kries and Mea Hoffmann, with texts by Lisa Dabscheck, Beatrice Galilee, Marvin Heiferman, Mea Hoffmann and Hans Ibelings. A thick softcover of about 600 pages and 687 images, in English and German. It moves from fast-growing cities and buildings by Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid to round Tulou houses in southern China and rock-hewn churches in Ethiopia. The best single overview of his work so far.
Brasilia – Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). Edited by Lars Müller, with texts by the writer Cees Nooteboom and an illustrated epilogue by Martino Stierli. 240 pages and 124 illustrations. Baan looks at two planned modernist capitals: Brasília by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, and Chandigarh by Le Corbusier. His pictures show everyday life there and how people have made these planned cities their own. For readers who care about cities as much as buildings.
Momentum of Light (Lars Müller Publishers, 2021). Made with the architect Francis Kéré, who wrote the text and added his sketches. 180 pages and 108 illustrations. The photographs show traditional buildings in Burkina Faso, with few and small openings. The rooms stay dark and cool, and the little light that enters becomes part of the architecture. Kéré grew up with this light, and his own buildings draw on it. The project was started by the lighting company Zumtobel Group. A quiet book for anyone interested in light.
52 Weeks, 52 Cities (Kehrer, 2014). The catalogue of his exhibition at MARTa Herford in Germany (December 2013 to March 2014), later shown at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. Texts by Roland Nachtigäller, Jörg Häntzschel and Jessica Collins, in German and English. 136 pages with 61 color pictures. It is a diary of one year of travel: one photograph for each week, with his own short comment, from new buildings to self-built homes, including Torre David in Caracas. Out of print, so look for a used copy.
In his words
“It’s very important for me to give the larger overview and try to get some distance from the architecture.”
