Brasilia Chandigarh: Living with Modernity places Iwan Baan's photography at the intersection of modernist urban planning and lived indigenous culture, tracing how two landmark 1960s city-building experiments became something neither their architects nor planners fully anticipated.
About This Book
When Lars Müller Publishers commissioned Dutch photographer Iwan Baan to document Brasilia and Chandigarh, the brief was architectural — but the resulting work is something more searching. Both cities represent the high-modernist ambition of reshaping human life through planned urban form: Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's federal capital in Brazil, Le Corbusier's grid city in the Punjab. Baan's lens does not dwell on monuments. Instead, it finds the friction and accommodation between imported architectural modernism and the communities that have since made these cities their own. Essays by writer Cees Nooteboom and architectural historian Martino Stierli frame the photographs within broader questions of memory, adaptation, and urban identity. Now reissued in a compact format, this is a quietly essential document of how modernist city planning endures — and transforms — in practice.
Key Features
- 240 pages of documentary photography tracking daily life within two canonical modernist cities
- Essays by Cees Nooteboom and Martino Stierli on Baan's photography and the architectural and planning history of both cities
- Published by Lars Müller Publishers, 2010
What You'll Discover
- How residents of Brasilia and Chandigarh have adapted and personalised spaces conceived under rigid modernist planning principles
- The visual and cultural friction between Le Corbusier's Chandigarh and the indigenous culture it was superimposed upon — and the parallel dynamic in Niemeyer and Costa's Brasilia
- Baan's methodology of photographing people within architecture rather than architecture alone, reframing both cities as human rather than ideological artefacts
- Martino Stierli's contextualisation of the architectural and planning histories that shaped both cities, alongside Nooteboom's literary response to Baan's images
About the Author
Iwan Baan (born 1975) is a Dutch photographer whose work focuses on architecture and the people who inhabit it. This publication also includes contributions from writer Cees Nooteboom and architectural historian Martino Stierli.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 240
- Dimensions: 22.7 x 17.0 x 2.54 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037787502
- Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
- Publication Date: 2010
Perfect For: Architects and urbanists interested in the legacy of modernist city planning, photographers and critics drawn to documentary work that situates people within architectural space, and readers researching the built histories of Brasilia or Chandigarh.