Iwan Baan (Alkmaar, Netherlands, 1975) is internationally regarded as one of the most outstanding architecture photographers. With his impressive images, he documents both the growth of global megalopolises and traditional architecture or informal constructions, in addition to works by renowned contemporary architects like Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Francis Kéré, David Chipperfield, Kazuyo Sejima and Tatiana Bilbao. Baan captures the buildings’ character and context by combining aerial images taken from a helicopter with an entire series of varied perspectives, from sweeping panoramic shots to close-ups.

The Museo ICO, the first stop on the international tour of this Vitra Design Museum exhibition, is hosting the first exhaustive retrospective of this Dutch photographer’s work. Through a broad selection of his works, the exhibition also offers an interesting overview of early twenty-first-century architecture contextualised in its urban and social settings and brought to life by the people who inhabit it.

Organised into four sections (Perspectives, China, Cities and Continuities ), it shows examples of all areas of Baan’s work from the early 2000s—when an encounter with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhas in 2004 became a decisive turning point in his specialisation in architecture photography—including films and little-known images of informal constructions: from a round Chinese village to a monolithic Ethiopian church, from self-built multi-storey dwellings in Cairo where the Coptic community recycles rubbish to the occupied Torre David in Caracas.