A year of the best architecture from around the world

Internationally acclaimed Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan is perpetually on the move. His 2010 photographic ‘diary’, currently exhibiting at the Villa Noailles (until 27 March) in southern France, is testament to his global nomadic life and comprises 52 commanding yet serene photographs of modern architecture in different cities, one for each week of the year. The exhibition has expanded to incorporate Baan’s recent images of the CCTV building in China.

Often chartering helicopters for aerial shots, Baan depicts from great heights how modern architecture can sit in harmony with its natural or urban surroundings. From Baan’s perspective the Ryue Nishizawa-designed Teshima Art Museum, perched on a hill, is as tranquil as the adjacent inland sea. Steven Holl’s Knut Hamsun museum in Norway is an alluring refuge amidst a Nordic winter snow scene at dusk. Equally Herzog & de Meuron’s Miami Beach offices and car park are in harmony with the concrete grid background, and even Burj Khalifa in Dubai has never seemed so at home nestled amongst Baan’s skyline.

Down on the ground Baan gets close to buildings and the people who use them, capturing a view of architecture away from the world of CGI renderings we normally expect to see from world leading architects’ offices. Instead he offers us a view of architecture in which people live symbiotically with contemporary buildings and where the architecture provides a stage for human inhabitation. From scenes of spectators in Herzog de Meuron’s Olympic stadium to views of MOMA PS1 as seen through the eyes of dancers, the architecture is never in the foreground, yet always present in the everyday habitation of the city, belonging to that city and to the people.

Delving further into placing the built environment in context, Baan has said that his interest lies in capturing how people interact with and inhabit buildings. The photographs resolutely reveal this interaction in a positive light: the buildings are luminous and are indeed places we would want to inhabit. No wonder then that Baan, who at 35 is a young yet rightful recipient of the Julius Shulman Photography Award, has been collaborating long-term with architects, including Zaha Hadid, SANAA and Rem Koolhaas who have been keen to commission his work.  

Rachel Borchard is a member of the Black Country Atelier