He is one of the world’s best and most prolific architecture photographers. When photographer Iwan Baan met Rem Koolhaas in 2004, he fell in love with architecture and began a lifelong journey to understanding “how people’s lives take place in and around buildings and how architecture and people are entangled,” as he writes in his new book Moments in Architecture—a catalog exhibtion of his current retrospective at Vitra Design Museum. The book demonstrates Baan’s immense contribution to documenting architecture and his own personal and contemporary style.
In his book, we learn that the formative projects of his career were made while he was in China. He initially went there to photograph OMA’s China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing, and so he was there when China went through its boom of new construction by Western starchitects. Baan documented that historical moment in real time because he is always interested in capturing the time when the architecture comes to life. His images are not frozen in time, and do not present architecture as monuments, but rather show a variety of buildings throughout the world as they are being formed and moved—presenting the social aspects of architecture, urban evolution, and its construction and processes.
This book documents historical moments of architecture worldwide—Tokyo, China, New York, Hong Kong—presenting local identities as well as global expressions. Moments in Architecture takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Baan’s lens and presents his unique view on the world during the first two decades of the 21st century.
The text is composed of essays along with Baan’s own account. He perceives himself as a storyteller, always exploring traces of history and narratives in the buildings he photographs. A global nomad, he spends much of his time travelling the world and exploring the continents, following urban evolutions and the buildings as well as individual life stories of some of the world’s most important architects like Herzog & de Meuron, Francis Kéré, Sou Fujimoto, Tatiana Bilbao, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SANAA, and Toyo Ito. His images tempt you to fall in love with architecture and help you understand the multifaceted identity of architecture with its layers and textures. “Technologies,” he says, “introduce new ways of seeing and documenting the world.” His work is highly contemporary, and therefore a testimony not only to the architecture of our time, but also to the way it is being documented today. The exhibition Iwan Baan: Moments in Architecture at Vitra Design Museum closes on March 3rd.
