Building the Picture: The Story of Architectural Photography

Author: Feature on photographer Iwan Baan (written by Vamika Sinha)
Year: 2024 (Aesthetica)
Source type: article (magazine feature)
Raw file: raw/articles/baan-2024-building-the-picture.md

Summary

A magazine feature marking the first large retrospective of Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan, "Moments in Architecture," at the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, 21 Oct – 3 Mar). The piece situates Baan's anti-idealizing, narrative-driven photography against the history of architectural image-making and against the pull of "destination architecture" and the "Bilbao effect." It argues that Baan documents buildings as "the setting of everyday life" rather than sanitized, unpopulated forms, and closes with a meditation on AI-generated architectural images bearing an "Instagram-face."

Key Claims

• Destination architecture: striking, iconic designs "asking for the lens" (Lotus Temple Delhi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Bilbao) create "an architectural market to attract visitors, form an identity marker and contribute to a country's growth." The "Bilbao effect" is a catch-all for the economic impact of cultural investment and remarkable new buildings.
• The critique of idealized photography: quoting David Coward ("Why Does it Never Rain in the Architectural Review?", Consuming Architecture, 2014): architectural photographs are often deemed remarkable only if they "present an idealised vision of the built environment" that plays down habitation, use and context; it is "almost unknown" for a magazine to commission a study of a building once occupied.
• Baan's alternative: he challenges "the norm of static, sanitised, solitary images, devoid of context," showing "how people interact with structures" and telling "the story of places." His process is intuitive — "lingering around and seeing the rhythm of the day" — and begins after the architect leaves the site, when people "take over the building, sometimes in very different ways than the architect imagined."
• The Torre David example: Baan's image of the unfinished Caracas tower taken over by squatters after the Venezuelan economic collapse reads as an "archive" of a specific moment, addressing "the complex relationship between urban development, architecture, society and the economy."
• Architecture as everyday life: the curatorial concept reads Baan's gaze as seeing "architecture not as an abstract ideal, but as the setting of everyday life, an organic part of the urban fabric."
• AI and "Instagram-face": AI lets architects "imagine thousands of different outcomes"; feeding on databases of photographers' work, AI output produces buildings "with 'Instagram-face' – modified to be hyper-beautiful, pixel-perfect and distinctly unreal." Baan: "It is shocking, fascinating and interesting to see when you type my name ... complete databases are sucked up by these learning algorithms."

Connections

Concepts: Architectural Photography · Bilbao Effect · Instagrammability · Iconic Architecture · Star Architecture · Spectacle
Authors: Iwan Baan · Nadia Alaily-Mattar · Guy Debord
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Visuality Peaks, Function Lasts

Direct Quotes

"It's about creating an architectural market to attract visitors, form an identity marker and contribute to a country's growth."

"[Baan] sees 'architecture not as an abstract ideal, but as the setting of everyday life, an organic part of the urban fabric.'"

"My photography is not so much timeless architecture photograph where all traces of living and humanity are removed. It very much depends on that specific moment in time."

"These are buildings with 'Instagram-face' – modified to be hyper-beautiful, pixel-perfect and distinctly unreal."

"How, then, to bridge the widening gap between aesthetics and authenticity?" (framing Coward's question)

Open Questions

• Whether the turn toward "more humanity" in architectural documentation that Baan represents can withstand the AI-driven demand for "Instagram-face" images, or whether it becomes recuperated into the same spectacular logic.
• If "function lasts" (Alaily-Mattar et al.), does Baan's emphasis on habitation make his images an index of function rather than spectacle — and is that how they circulate and gain value?