52 Weeks and Cities of Iwan Baan

Exhibition 52 Weeks, 52 Cities is a journey to a year in architectural photographer Iwan Baan’s nomadic life and work through 60 photographs, which show built and occupied architectures as human habitats. In the exhibition, which is currently on show at Kvadrat showroom in Copenhagen, the photographer also reveals how he encounters and perceives the world while constantly travelling around the globe.

“What I find especially fascinating is what happens when the architects and planners are gone and the places are appropriated by people,” Baan explains.

The works in the exhibition vary from showing urban interconnections such as the architectural proliferation in the Cairo suburb Zabaleen or the power cuts in Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy. These overviews shot from a helicopter alternate with intimate close-ups of cities, buildings and their inhabitants.

“Iwan Baan has had – and still has – an overwhelming impact on the way contemporary architectural photography is perceived today,” explains Kvadrat’s CEO Anders Byriel. “Iwan has brought emotion and relativity back into a normally quite dry art form.”

Baan, who focuses on recording the various ways in which individuals, communities and societies create and interact within their built environment, studied photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague. Today, he photographs for the most influential architecture firms in the world, such as Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & Meuron, Toyo Ito and Sanaa, but is also an avid documentarist of informal communities, in which vernacular architecture and placemaking serve as examples of human ingenuity. His images of the Torre David high-rise in Caracas won the Golden Lion for Best Installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

52 Weeks, 52 Cities was originally curated by the Martha Herford museum in Germany. The exhibition at Danish design company Kvadrat’s showroom from 10 September–16 October 2015 is the first exhibition presenting Baan’s work in the Scandinavia. •