WHEN I WORKED AT the Los Angeles Times, a photographer colleague once told me that the assignment he dreaded most was shooting “building mugs.” This consisted of photographing the exterior of a building—often the headquarters of some international corporation—as a way of illustrating a story in which the human subjects were unwilling or unable to stand before the camera. Think of the myriad images of Purdue Pharma’s Stamford, Connecticut, headquarters that have been used to illustrate reports about the OxyContin scandal. In these, the building’s inverted ziggurat profile is frequently shown brooding and looming, often at dusk or at night. Since being introduced to the term, I find myself looking for these kinds of images while scanning headlines. Government buildings frequently appear in building mugs—from state houses to the Pentagon to the White House (though the bucolic gardens at the latter can mitigate the recriminatory mood). This year, building mugs of Boeing’s Arlington, Virginia, corporate campus have made regular appearances in news reports about safety problems related to the 737 Max, with the company’s logo often shrouded by a clutch of foreboding trees. Like police station mugshots, building mugs are unsympathetic: stark, severe, making the structure in question appear as if it were clasping a booking number in the wake of a rough night.
The building mug renders buildings as truants. The history of architectural photography, however, contains far more reverent depictions of the built environment. In the mid–twentieth century United States, Ezra Stoller functioned as modernism’s court portraitist, capturing the majesty and elegance of structures such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, generally unencumbered by people. Julius Shulman, meanwhile, was the movement’s chronicler of West Coast vibe, portraying the luminous California designs of Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig as glamorous performers at the peak of their fame.
In the twenty-first century, there is Iwan Baan, who brings yet another approach, one rooted in street photography. In his documentary projects, buildings aren’t represented as exalted individuals but as bodies among bodies. Baan captures structures when they aren’t looking, when they’re part of the crowd, from behind and above and in between. He employs inhospitable underpasses and industrial-scale rooftops punctured by ventilation equipment as framing devices. He captures the nondescript alleys, anodyne escalators, and oceanic parking lots—areas he has described as “leftover space”—that must be navigated when approaching Very Important Architecture. Toyo Ito’s National Taichung Theater (2013) in Taiwan, a glass box embraced by a sequence of hourglass concrete forms, is seen peeking out from amid banal residential towers. Baan will show you the elegant, arched concrete legs of Oscar Niemeyer’s 1960s-era TV Tower in Brasília as well as the gaggle of vendors hawking T-shirts and coffee mugs at its feet. He presents the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick’s deadly and mind-numbingly expensive shawarma-shaped public sculpture in New York’s Hudson Yards, looming behind a brightly colored food truck plying actual shawarma—pretentious aspirant and unassuming doppelgänger in a single frame. Baan has expressed admiration for photographers such as Mitch Epstein and Martin Parr, who are known for the casual, improvised ways in which they capture bodies and structures in cacophonous space—and who aren’t afraid to be a little garish in the process. In Baan’s work, you will find echoes of their techniques.
Keeping up with Baan, even on the printed page, requires stamina.
For more than two decades, the Dutch-born Baan, who is just shy of fifty, has been the field’s go-to image maker, shooting buildings in Baku and Beijing, Milan and Madrid—often on commission for a coterie of high-profile firms that have included the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Zaha Hadid Architects, and Herzog & de Meuron, to name but a few. For smaller firms, having him on board as photographer can bring an imprimatur of prestige. The combination of high-value architecture and gritty realism might seem counterintuitive, but what Baan has brought to the form is the ability to capture edifices in the messy act of being inhabited, along with elements of their broader urban context. “I found it always interesting when I started working with architects, all their renderings, their drawings, they were always full of people,” he told the design podcast Second Studio in 2022. “But then you usually saw the architecture pictures of the finished building where people are totally absent. It’s only sort of the framed building and nothing around it—it could be anywhere in the world.” It’s worth noting that the messiest of Baan’s images tend to be left off architects’ websites and appear only in his books and exhibitions.
What makes this output possible is Baan’s omnivorous—one might say, ravenous—methods. Unlike his predecessors, who were generally focused on one region or style, he is everywhere all at once, photographing an experimental glass house designed by Sou Fujimoto in Tokyo one moment, an Ethiopian rock church the next. His travel schedule is beyond grueling. A sample itinerary might take him, over the course of mere days, from Mexico City to Los Angeles to New York to Boston to Glasgow. This once led the Wall Street Journal, in an obsequious profile, to describe him as “the Indiana Jones of architecture photography.” That piece opens with Baan renting a helicopter to shoot David Chipperfield’s Museo Jumex (2013) in Mexico City, then arranging to rent another when he doesn’t get the needed angles. (Baan has a penchant for aerials. One of his most famous, The City and the Storm, captured a partially blacked out New York City at night in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in 2012; the image wound up on the cover of New York Magazine.) Ultimately, the photographer’s compulsive work ethic has resulted in a voluminous output. When he began work on a major retrospective of his work held at Germany’s Vitra Design Museum last year, he sent curator Mea Hoffman fourteen thousand images for consideration; they winnowed the list down to about one thousand.
The catalogue for that show, Iwan Baan: Moments in Architecture (Vitra Design Museum), is one of several books that have appeared under his name in the past eighteen months. (His publishing schedule is as prodigious as his photo-making.) Brasília-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Lars Müller Publishers) was published late last year and is a compact reissue of his popular 2010 tome exploring the legacy of modernist master-planned cities in Brazil and India. In June, he released Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses (also Lars Müller Publishers), which juxtaposes the architecture of two tourist-saturated cities that, as writer Ryan Scavnicky describes in one of the featured essays, contain “loud buildings working hard to capture your attention.” That same month, American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana (Monacelli Press), an in-depth study of an important hub of Midwestern modernism, also landed on bookshelves. (The latter is one of his odder projects: a series of formal portraits of largely unpeopled midcentury buildings punctured by the occasional flash of everyday life—like the Dairy Queen sign that beckons with an offer of pumpkin and pecan pie.) Collectively, these amount to more than 1,600 pages of material and thousands of images. Keeping up with Baan, even on the printed page, requires stamina.
MOMENTS IN ARCHITECTURE is a good place to begin. Tracing the arc of Baan’s prolific career, an introductory essay by Hoffman covers his origin story: the Agfa Clack he received for his twelfth birthday, his stint studying photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and his introduction to OMA’s Rem Koolhaas through a friend in 2004, which launched his career as a paparazzo of the Pritzker class. Koolhaas hired him to chronicle the construction of his firm’s China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Beijing, and every couple of months Baan flew to the city to chart its progress, a symbol of the technologically advanced “New China” that was emerging in advance of the 2008 Olympics. During that time, he also captured the rising National Stadium (a.k.a. the Bird’s Nest) for Herzog & de Meuron and a monumental housing complex for Steven Holl, as well as architectural projects organized by artist Ai Weiwei. Moments in Architecture devotes three dozen pages to Baan’s formative dispatches from the CCTV compound (which opened in 2012, nearly a decade after the project broke ground), and the photos point to a photographer who was there to document rather than render hagiographic portraits of buildings. Yes, the portfolio includes heroic images of the main tower ascending over the Beijing skyline, as well as sleek depictions of the structure’s freshly completed interiors. But there are also views of the construction site as seen through lines of drying laundry and the profile of the illuminated building soaring above an improvised worker tent camp at dusk—a picture of global finance and its corollary, manual labor in precarious conditions.
From there, the catalogue runs through the commissions that have kept Baan pinballing between global capitals for the last couple of decades: Ito’s headquarters for Mikimoto in Tokyo (2005); Grafton Architects’ Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Lima, Peru (2015); Zaha Hadid Architects’ MAXXI museum in Rome (2010). Baan has been the chronicler of the age of starchitecture. But more compelling are the subsequent sections, which bring together his personal documentary projects: images of cities (Dhaka, Houston, Tokyo), informally built communities (like Nigeria’s floating shantytown of Makoko), followed by a sequence of aerials (so many helicopters).

Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center Ben Nadler
In interviews, Baan has stated that he generally eschews retouching and uses Photoshop primarily for darkroom effects, aiming instead to capture environments as they are. His commissioned output, however, is on the whole polished, and you can find within it the glamour shots typical of architectural photography: a blurry figure descending a sculptural staircase or a single person framed by a window. A spread featuring Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University (2016) practically feels like a rendering, with the building’s guts illuminated to an unnatural degree as New York City lies before it in a cinematically muted gray. Baan may bring a more informal quality to his commissioned work than the architectural photographers of years past—or many of the present, who still portray buildings as if they were discrete art objects. But he still knows how to make capital-A Architecture look majestic. In using the more unremarkable aspects of cities to frame structures, he is akin to the fashion photographer who places a model wearing haute couture in the middle of a grungy alley: The antithetical environment serves to highlight the sumptuous nature of the design. See the aerial photograph he made of the Heydar Aliyev Centre (2013) in Baku, Azerbaijan, which shows Zaha Hadid Architects’ undulating cultural complex flanked by a forest of dull residential towers. It’s an image that captures the way this trophy building has been imposed onto the landscape. (Aliyev was, after all, a dictator.) But it sells us on it, too. Is your cityscape placeless and dreary? Just add starchitecture.
Baan’s documentary projects, however, are truer to life. A commercial street in Dhaka, Bangladesh, buzzes with human activity, bright signage and pedicabs. In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, a pair of women peer at you from over the edges of a stack of Brutalist balconies. In Kansas, the bright, pastel-colored façade of a Latino-owned ice cream shop interrupts a subdued main street. Baan has long been fascinated by self-built communities, or what he has described as “architecture without architects.” And especially remarkable are his visual chronicles of life inside the Torre David in Caracas, a financial tower that was left incomplete in the wake of the Venezuelan banking crisis of 1994 and was ultimately taken over by squatters. Its inhabitants transformed the large corporate floorplates into a series of vertical villages, complete with markets, a barbershop, and a rooftop gym. The pictures engage the rhythms of life in this unusual, informal settlement. People go to work, shop, play basketball, and climb endless flights of stairs. In one image, a woman poses contentedly in the space she has created for herself: a room with a pink bed and soft yellow walls lined with stuffed animals, a bit of youthful femininity carved out of the remains of a late-capitalist shipwreck. They are intimate, affecting images. It’s little wonder that they were part of a project that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012.
But there isn’t much time to dwell on Caracas because before we know it Moments in Architecture has taken us to Makoko, followed by the fortified earth houses of Longyan, China, and the Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan. The continuous leaps are not surprising for a catalogue marking a career-spanning retrospective. And in typical Baan style, even the book’s physical form avoids the architectural cliché of coffee-table high gloss: The pages are matte, the scale compact, the binding made of paper. But at more than six hundred pages, trying to meaningfully absorb all the moments contained within is a little bit like trying to drink from a fire hose.
ON THEIR OWN, neither Baan’s glossy commissions nor his rugged documentary projects are entirely unique. (National Geographic photographers have been chronicling the curious corners of human habitation for more than a century, including sites like Makoko and the aforementioned rock churches of Ethiopia.) But in bringing the two forms together, Baan combines the ability to capture what makes a building magnetic, while also being sympathetic to the ways in which people will doggedly mold a space to their needs—regardless of its architectural pedigree. Brasília-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity is instructive in this way. The book juxtaposes the famed midcentury modernist cities that were constructed in top-down fashion by prominent architectural teams: Brasília, by the duo of urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Niemeyer, and Chandigarh, in the Indian Punjab, by an evolving group that ultimately included British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew and, most notably, Le Corbusier, who was supported by his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Both undertakings were absolutely pharaonic enterprises. In Brazil, the project arose from a long-running plan dating back to the nineteenth century to create a centralized capital—a plan that was ultimately put into action in the late 1950s by President Juscelino Kubitschek, a charismatic former physician who was determined to bring modernity and industrialization to his largely rural nation. (His slogan: “Fifty years’ progress in five.”) In India, the development of Chandigarh emerged as a result of partition in 1947: India lost its Punjabi capital of Lahore to Pakistan, leading Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first postindependence prime minister, to call for the creation of a new city. As historian and curator Martino Stierli writes in the closing essay, Chandigarh represented “a unique chance for the new nation to manifest its self-confidence and economic, cultural, and political aspirations.”
These are odd cities, rising not organically out of local ways of living, but out of utopian ideals about progress and function (or, more accurately, separation of functions). For his project, Baan visited both settlements more than half a century after their establishment as a way of gauging “how people are living, thriving, or coping with Modernism today.” The experience of paging through the book, which is divided into two sections—the first attends to Brasília, the second to Chandigarh—is a little bit like visiting with a pair of eccentric grandes dames. Baan resists producing glamour shots of architectural monuments, instead choosing to show the buildings as they are. In one of his Brasília tableaux, you’ll find a man selling refreshments in the sliver of shade provided by an elevated walkway, while in another, two girls sunbathe languidly on a bench in front of the National Library. At the High Court in Chandigarh, oath officers and notary publics sit behind bright, hand-painted desks arranged along shaded passageways. In one spread, bureaucrats move about a room overflowing with paper files. The machine for living, it turns out, is totally analogue.
In using the more unremarkable aspects of cities to frame structures, Baan is akin to the fashion photographer who places a model wearing haute couture in the middle of a grungy alley.
Though some tweaks were made to the texts for the reissue, and the volume’s dimensions have been reduced, Brasília-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity has been reprinted largely as it was in 2010, with the original essays by Stierli (now chief curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art) and Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom. The republication would have been a good opportunity to include a voice from Brasília or Chandigarh, rather than having the cities assessed by a trio of European men. (Architectural historian Vikramaditya Prakash, who grew up in Chandigarh, and whose father, Aditya Prakash, was a noted Indian modernist who served on the city’s planning team, would have been at the top of my list.) Moreover, for a book that purports to study how people inhabit these modernist capitals, strangely underrepresented are domestic spaces. On the occasions these are shown, they’re seen principally from the outside. (Shaun Fynn’s 2017 photographic tome, Chandigarh Revealed, is more complete in this regard.)
Focusing on façades, however, works perfectly for Baan’s Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, because façades are what these two cities are about. The project began as an exhibition organized by curator Lindsay Harris for the American Academy in Rome to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the groundbreaking study of the Strip by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour that famously declared, “Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.” Baan returns to the comparison with the same earnest, delighted approach. In the opening pages, a full-bleed image of Rome is presented at left; Vegas is on the right. There are no captions or other identifiers. Instead, the Roman Colosseum bleeds into Caesars Palace; the Sistine Chapel gives way to a casino; and Saint Peter’s Square rubs up against the spired medieval castle that houses the Excalibur Hotel, home to some of the Strip’s more mediocre rooms, as well as a Dick’s Last Resort and a Bee Gees Tribute band.
As the contributing authors note, there isn’t as much difference between Rome and Las Vegas as you might imagine. “Rome isn’t as honest as we assume,” writes Scavnicky. “Like elsewhere, its architecture derives from using as little material as possible in providing the most effective visual. Trevi Fountain, seen at an angle in Baan’s photographs, can also be understood as architecturally thin.” Indeed, an overhead view reveals the ridiculous ostentation of a façade slapped onto an otherwise ordinary palazzo. In another frame, an impressive Renaissance palazzo on the Piazza della Repubblica turns out to be a trompe l’oeil scrim that disguises construction scaffolding. These are building mugs by way of Paris Hilton’s mugshot: messy and revealing, but still striking a note of charisma. It’s a perfect setup for the images of Vegas that follow, which include a fake Trevi Fountain, a fake Eiffel Tower, and a fake Egyptian pyramid. Baan photographs these structures as if they were carnival-goers in masks—though he also shows you what the mask doesn’t cover: industrial loading docks, blistering parking lots, and scales so behemoth they violate every rule that Vitruvius established about connecting the symmetries of architecture to the human body.
Baan captures structures when they aren’t looking, when they’re part of the crowd, from behind and above and in between.
Rome – Las Vegas brings out Baan’s inner Martin Parr, the British photographer known for his satirical images of tourists and tourism, a force that has shaped both the Eternal City and Sin City. A pair of listless Elvises stand on a Vegas sidewalk. A blonde in a bright tank top poses for a picture at the Roman Forum, a gust of wind blowing hair in her face. I particularly enjoyed a series of frames that capture the improvised photo shoots staged by travelers amid the uncanny-looking plantings inside the Bellagio’s “botanical garden,” which is less a garden than a bizarre installation of flowers that looks like it was made by fairies on acid. The poses, the ensembles, and the setting are all extreme, documenting a performance by both building and tourist. When Baan is at ground level, he has a keen eye for these sorts of unreal scenes, but too often in Rome – Las Vegas, as in some of his other books, he spends more time in helicopters than is needed. Aerials of Rome at sunset feel more romantic than revelatory; bird’s-eye views of Vegas’s cookie-cutter suburban sprawl are practically a staple of any news report about the city’s quixotic push into the desert that surrounds it. I would have preferred to see some of the back-of-house spaces in the casinos, which could have connected life on the Strip with the workers who help craft the spectacle on a daily basis.
IN AUGUST I WENT TO an American Cinematheque screening of Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which captures, with creeping slowness, the final night of an old Taipei cinema before it closes forever. The story is as much about the weird characters who attend to the place as it is about the theater itself: the messy projection room, the leaky passages, the glaring ceramic tile bathrooms where patrons cruise. In a conversation after the show, Tsai talked about an exercise he once did with a group of students, where they set out to find the “heart” of the building they studied in. For a week, they explored the various floors and discussed where the heart lay. One day, they came upon a room where someone had plugged in an old steamer that contained a shoutao, or longevity bun (a type of sweet bun baked to resemble a peach, often eaten during birthday celebrations). Tsai said that he immediately realized that the steamer and its bun were the heart of the building—and he ended up including that very steamer, along with a longevity bun, in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The pastry marks a moment of sumptuous color in the film: a bright pink shoutao being extracted from the vintage green rice cooker by a beautiful young woman.
If I now regularly look for building mugs, I also search for the heart of the places around me or those I visit. In my home, it’s the worn wooden cutting boards I use to prepare all my meals. At a bar in LA’s Chinatown I recently patronized, the heart could be found in a portrait of an ancestor installed above an altar by the front door. As I flipped through Baan’s images I found myself looking for the heart in his depictions, that emotional jolt akin to what Roland Barthes once defined as photography’s “punctum” —“that accident which pricks me.” In Moments in Architecture, it can be found in an arrangement of domestic objects—a set of eyeglasses, a cup of water, a remote control—on a tablecloth imprinted with bright images of vegetables in a courtyard house in Yinxian, China. In Brasília-Chandigarh, it’s a young Brazilian student studying in an empty classroom, the walls behind her tagged with marijuana leaves and an anarchy symbol. In Rome–Las Vegas, it’s the stuffed Smurf held at the end of a pointer by a flustered tour guide inside the Vatican. In American Modern, his book about the Indianapolis exurb of Columbus, Indiana, it’s the frilly fall decorations that peek through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a midcentury brick building designed by Harry Weese.
These are building mugs by way of Paris Hilton’s mugshot: messy and revealing, but still striking a note of charisma.
Making images of the heart requires patience. Sometimes—as in the striking photographs Baan has made of the sculptural interiors of the dim, mud-walled homes of Burkina Faso—it also requires incredible stillness. The frenetic pace of his travel, however, which is reflected in the frenetic pacing of his books, leaves little space for stillness. In a 2021 interview, Baan said that all the travel keeps him on his toes. “In places that you know well, you start taking things for granted, you overlook details,” he said. “This is why travel is so important to me, it takes me out of my comfort zone and I become acutely aware of my surroundings.” Baan has been important to architectural photography, capturing the bodies of buildings as they exist in their milieu—at times, with grandeur; at others, with irreverence. But there’s something about his peripatetic nature that feels rooted in the jet-setting of the starchitecture era, in which more time is spent in business class than at any one destination. And this restlessness can translate into photographic projects that don’t quite cohere.
American Modern is presumably intended to chronicle a city that isn’t a precious architectural monument, but a living, breathing, evolving community that exists on a resolutely human scale. As Richard McCoy, the executive director of the Landmark Columbus Foundation, which helps steward the town’s modernist heritage, writes in the introduction, the book’s intent is to show Columbus as a “place you can access, a place where you might imagine yourself visiting or living.” But American Modern features so many aerial photographs it comes off more as boys- with-toys than an artist who is genuinely interested in meeting a subject on its own terms. Baan, however, can be transcendent when he keeps his feet on the earth, taking you along a narrow path to a stone church alongside a Christian pilgrim or leading you to a pump house on Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh, where a man attempts to bring life to a bare concrete walkway with a row of pink bougainvilleas in pots. These images are not about movement but careful observation. Slow down and you will find the heart.