SALA Off-Script: III Caracas

GREG GIRARD in conversation with IWAN BAAN This conversation will focus on Baan’s work on Torre David, a nearly-completed but abandoned 45-story office tower in Caracas, occupied by some 1000 families living in the improvised vertical community. Baan’s photographs illuminate life in this working-class community and investigate the different strategies residents employ in making a life for themselves and their families in a structure without electricity, running water, or on the unfinished upper floors, railings, safety barriers, walls or windows. As with questions he attempted to answer in his own work on the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, another informal vertical community, Girard will try to separate reality from myth. Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is widely recognized for his photographs of buildings by some of the world’s best-known architects and for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. With no formal training in architecture, his perspective mirrors the questions and perspectives of the everyday individuals who give meaning and context to the architecture and public spaces that surround us.