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Iwan Baan is one of today’s leading photographers of architecture and urban design. His images document the growth of global megacities and portray buildings by prominent contemporary architects including Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. The first large retrospective of the Dutch photographer’s work will open at the Vitra Design Museum in autumn 2023. Baan’s vibrant realism puts the focus on people and their relationship to the built environment.

His observant eye presents architecture not as an abstract ideal, but as the setting of everyday life, an organic part of the urban fabric – be it suburban sprawl or the booming metropoles of Africa and Asia. The exhibition will include a number of Baan’s iconic works, many of which are familiar from magazines and books, as well as photographs of vernacular and informal architecture all around the world, from the round Tulou of southern China to the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia. Thanks to the great scope of his vision, Baan’s works offer a broad panorama of human building that impressively demonstrates the existential importance of architecture and urban design.