Baan Voyage | New York Review of Architecture

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.