REVIEW OF: ‘Instants in architecture’ by Iwan Baan at Museo ICO: An omnipresent eye

The notable merit of Iwan Baan’s career is that it reflects with great clarity the changes that have occurred in the ideological context of architecture in the last twenty years. This photographer and his camera are participants, perhaps accidentally, in this recent history: of the transition period that led from the era of opulence and murky relations of architecture with political and economic power to the exaltation of poor populism that came after the crisis. 2008. Baan is one of the bridges that links the most outrageous icon of Rem Koolhaas, CCTV in Beijing -propaganda apparatus of the Chinese regime-, with the obscene ‘poverty-porn’ of the research project David Tower from Urban Think Tank.

The recognized link

Connecting link of the two faces adopted by those who are the great powers of today’s architecture. His work is home to both the work of Zaha Hadid and Herzog & de Meuron as for that of Francis Kéré and Anna Heringer, involuntarily revealing how the apparent differences between these two materializations share the same underlying ideological substance.

Mea Hoffmann points out in her text for the catalog of this exhibition, produced by Vitra Design Museum, that Baan rejects the name “architectural photographer.” He is right to do so, because one might wonder if the success of his work is not due more to his proximity to the content created by an ‘instragrammer’ than to that of an architectural photographer, in the strict sense of the term.

Although Hoffmann wants to suggest that Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller, Certainly two of the most important photographers of the discipline and still essential references, are direct antecedents of Baan, if you observe him closely, you will be able to see how little there is in his work of the poetics of Stoller and the narrative cleanliness of Shulman . And such a difference is not attributable to the social and cultural change of the times, the technical or technological supports, but because Baan’s view is, in coherence with these times, grandiloquently vain and self-complacent.

His photographs, a priori, contrast with the predominant approach, which prioritizes the purist representation (sometimes even involving sublimation) of the building. Baan chooses to represent the supposed “living reality” of the building, incorporating people walking through it and using it, showing it located within the urban landscape of which it is a part (often emphasizing its intense difference from it). However, despite this supposed ‘naturalness’ that would cast a critical gaze, there is no such issue in his photography, but rather he seems to take pleasure in observing reality passively and with commiseration through his first-world lens. Baan must have been around the world a thousand times; However, he sees reality from above, without seeming to want to get involved in any way with many of those realities that he places in front of his camera.

«Baan plays an important role in giving visibility to certain people, projects and cultures, which contributes to their recognition in Western discourse. By extension, his building images not only reflect the ‘status quo’, but also “They interact with and influence the architectural canon,” writes Hoffmann. This is also true, but it is necessary to ask in what sense, because more than an “architectural photographer,” Baan is surely more of a “storyteller.”

Another contemporary ‘storyteller’: a narrator of prodigious and false stories, like the one he helped build around the aforementioned David Tower, which allowed both him and Urban Think Tank to win the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Biennale. A story that sought to present survival in an infected building inhabited by people outside the system or abandoned by it as a beautiful social utopia.

This is why superlative epithets, devices of mere empty rhetoric such as that “Baan is an icon in itself”, which formulates Beatrice Galilee, They end up not being harmless because they end up nourishing a discourse that needs a review of its integrity and coherence, such as that of the media discourse of contemporary architecture.