“There was an intense flowering of experimental and futuristic architecture in the 1960s and 70s, which the young African countries used to express their national identities,” says [Swiss architect Manuel] Herz, who has curated an exhibition of more than 80 buildings from sub-Saharan Africa, showing at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until May. “But we simply don’t know about it... we wanted to show this incredible cultural wealth that also exists.” — The Guardian

The clinics here are simple, even handsome. Instead of constructing hermetic shields in the form of airtight, inflexible hospital buildings, the architects took advantage of Haiti’s Caribbean environment, exploiting island cross breezes to heal patients and aid caregivers.

It’s not clear yet how well the clinics will work. [...] If they turn out right, they could serve as relatively light-footed models for other struggling countries that lack resources for high-end Western-style hospitals. — nytimes.com

Thirty years ago, the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri complained that pictures of well-known buildings were often as conventional and flat as mediocre still-life paintings "but executed out of doors." [...]

The new architectural photography exhibition at the Barbican, "Constructing Worlds," sets out, as Ghirri himself did in shooting buildings by the architect Aldo Rossi, to explore another approach [...]. Something very different, in other words, from "maximum clarity." — latimes.com

Baan, who began shooting buildings in earnest less than a decade ago, balances politeness with relentlessness—qualities that help explain his rapid rise in the architecture world. So compelling is his work, which depicts the world's buildings being used, misused or even abused, that top-tier architects like Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid dispatch him to photograph all of their new projects, requiring him to fly hundreds of thousands of miles a year. — online.wsj.com

Over two dozen students crammed into the newly opened photo studio in the basement of Gund Hall on Wednesday for a hands-on workshop with one of the world’s premier architectural photographers. Iwan Baan, who has documented some of the most famous buildings of our time, kicked off the GSD’s spring lecture program the night before with a discussion of his recent work documenting informal settlements. — gsd.harvard.edu

One of the most widely published photographers of contemporary architecture, Iwan Baan is noted for his documentary images that narrate the life and interactions occurring within architecture. His approachable photos focused on the portrayal of people in the sociocultural context of architecture intrigue such clients as Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito and Zaha Hadid, but also The New York Times, Domus or Abitare. — youtube.com

Photographer Iwan Baan shows how people build homes in unlikely places, touring us through the family apartments of Torre David, a city on the water in Nigeria, and an underground village in China. Glorious images celebrate humanity's ability to survive and make a home -- anywhere. — youtube.com

Answer: Baku, Azerbaijan, where the government is spending an estimated $6 billion a year on architecture projects. As we wrote in February, Azerbaijan’s leaders want to make their capital city a destination for the rich and fabulous. The latest example: the Heydar Aliyev Center designed by Zaha Hadid, for whom it offered the rare opportunity of nearly total design freedom. Every roof and ceiling panel is different, Hadid says. — nytimes.com

Occupying some 350 square-metres of lawn in front of the Serpentine Gallery, Sou Fujimoto's delicate, latticed structure of 20mm steel poles will have a lightweight and semi-transparent appearance that will allow it to blend, cloud-like, into the landscape and against the classical backdrop of the Gallery's colonnaded East wing. Designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space - with a café sited inside - visitors will be encouraged to enter and interact with the Pavilion... — serpentinegallery.org

In Makoko, a sprawling slum on the waterfront of Lagos, Nigeria, tens of thousands of people live in rickety wood houses teetering above the fetid lagoon. It’s an old fishing village on stilts, increasingly battered by floods from heavy rains and rising seas. Because the settlement was becoming dangerous, the government forcibly cleared part of it last year. — NYT