Sitting down with Iwan Baan, a photographer, who chronicles the built environment, both planned and unplanned, one is struck by how considered this peripatetic man is. His answers are unhurried, and his towering frame belies his ability to blend with the crowd, taking photos that juxtapose, inform and ultimately record the way people live and build today.
Says Baan, a Dutch architectural photographer who was in Mumbai recently, “I think all projects that I photograph, they don’t deal just with architecture or just a specific corner or a pristine project, but also very much with urban conditions.”
These urban conditions can range from the sinuous curves of China’s new Harbin Opera House (which Baan photographed last year), to Nigeria’s Makoko Floating School, a triangular, prism-like assemblage of wooden beams atop a plastic flotation platform.
In both cases, Baan brings, in his own words, “this mix of, this very close up and micro, sort of, cosmos where you step into how people live in these places, what happens with people in these places, how they adapt to places, how they change places; to this very macro overview, views which come out in my aerial photography, where you see how these cities really become almost landscapes on their own.”
This ability to tell the whole story, from the context of the building to its surrounding environment, to the way that it is used, is one of the reasons Baan, along with architecture critic Justin McGuirk and Urban Think Tank, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. Their project, on the Torre de David, a 45-storey unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, which is now occupied and creatively re-used by 3,000 people, is emblematic of the kind of work Baan does in his own time. He says the building is, “a derelict construction site completely taken over by 3,000 people who’ve built this incredible sort of informal pop-up urbanism, inside [the] construction site and it totally fascinated me. It took at least nine months or a year to really get to know the people there [and] convince them that it would be interesting to document because it was a very hidden or secluded site.”
This search for the unusual has taken Baan to cities as diverse as Hampi, Chandigarh, and even the Kumbh Mela, on his travels to India. About the mela, he says, “I spent 10 days at the Kumbh Mela, which is like an incredible mega-city of its own. It’s this totally ephemeral mega-city, which pops-up — this city completely made out of sarees, fabrics, and which,in an incredible way, works for the months that it is there and almost literally gets washed away. So I documented that and I made a large series. It’s part also, of another, longer-term project of mine. But it’s all these very specific ways people build for themselves, and urban environments, they can be permanent for hundreds or thousands of years, to completely ephemeral ones.”
Some of the more concrete cities he’s captured include Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s master-planned State capital, and Varanasi. He’s candid about the challenges that India faces as it urbanises rapidly,
He’s documented Chandigarh’s modernism and juxtaposed it against Brasília, another city planned and built according to the vision of a single architect (Oscar Niemeyer). In both cities, he captures how structures and avenues are lived in, instead of imagined. So Le Corbusier’s sculptural buildings are shown 50-60 years after being completed, with old books running along the walls. Another shot has a man washing his clothes in the shadow of the city’s High Court.
True to his aim, Baan has captured how the city has morphed beyond the imagination of its architect. The resultant book, Brasilia-Chandigarh: Living with Modernity , sums up Baan’s approach to his profession: “How people use these spaces, how people adapt spaces and I think you see the same kind of ideas all across that spectrum, from what people build themselves in incredible, challenging conditions, to what architects design or urban planners design. I find it fascinating to see these kinds of parallels through that full spectrum.”
Through the end of December and beginning of January, Baan has been delighting his approximately 86,000 Instagram followers with photos of India from his iPhone. The trip, which began in Mumbai, has seen him document the architectural wonders of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and more.
Talking about India’s architecture and design ethos, Baan says, “India has such a challenging future with these large mega-cities and how they develop and how people have to find a way to live in these places. Where governments have incredible challenges of creating conditions for these massive amounts of people. So, I find it fascinating, I don’t think I have an answer on these things either, but they’re incredible places to discover and I’m not sure yet what I will do with these kind of things, but these are longer-term projects.”
Aatish Nath writes primarily about food, drink and design.
