A man with black hair and thick eyebrows squats on a concrete patio, a pile of plastic waste on his right and a jumbled chaos of cushions chairs on his left. He’s looking past a clothesline tied to a tree toward a looming, angular structure, partially-built and sinister. There’s a hint of the undecipherable figure about it (think Escher’s impossible cube), but something else, too. This skyscraper, formed of a pair of conjoined towers, looks like a gaping mouth poised to devour the man observing it.

The Dutch photographer Iwan Baan took this image as part of a series documenting the construction of the 51-story China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing—a project, by Rem Koolhaas’s architectural firm OMA, which took ten years to finish (2002–2012). Baan’s pictures show not only the emerging and completed structure but also the workers who raise such buildings from the ground up and the people who live in their shadows.

Just as Koolhaas revolutionized modern architecture, Baan broke the convention of idealized and mostly deserted architectural photographs by inviting human beings into the frame with sensitivity and vivid realism.

“I had no idea about architecture,” Baan told Observer, speaking of his beginnings as a professional documentary photographer specializing in the built environment, “but he [Koolhaas] saw something in my images”.

And from there, so did many others. His first comprehensive retrospective, “Iwan Baan: Moments in Architecture” at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, is an exploration of the Dutch photographer’s oeuvre produced over the past........

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