Lecture: Wednesday, September 3, 2025, 5:00 p.m.
Opening Reception: 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Exhibition on View: September 3–October 25, 2025
Location: William T. Cannady Hall, Rice School of Architecture
Admission: Free and open to the public
The Rice School of Architecture presents Iwan Baan: The Notational Surface, a new solo exhibition by the world-renowned Dutch photographer whose work has reshaped how we see cities and the lives they hold. Developed over the past five years for the school’s Houston Archive Project, this commission traces the city from the street to the sky, offering a layered reading of its infrastructures, interdependencies, and environmental precarity.
Installed across two floors of Cannady Hall, the exhibition shifts visitors’ vantage points—from the intimacy of ground-level encounters to expansive aerial surveys of oil landscapes, intermodal networks, and polycentric suburbs. Printed on industrial blue-back affiche paper and suspended at sharp angles, the photographs create a spatial montage that invites viewers to “read” Houston as an active surface of marks, flows, and forces.
A full-color catalog accompanies the exhibition, featuring a foreword by William Ward Watkin Dean Igor Marjanović, and an essay by architect and theorist Clare Lyster, whose interpretive framework lends the title The Notational Surface. Together, these texts situate Baan’s images within a broader discourse on representation, asking how seeing differently might enable more just and imaginative futures.
Launched in 2024, the Houston Archive Project is a curatorial platform for architectural thinking grounded in the specificity of place. By commissioning significant new bodies of work, the project continues a lineage at the school of photographic inquiry into Houston’s evolving urbanism—work that connects local conditions to planetary systems and publics.
Credits
Artist: Iwan Baan
Graphic Identity: Experimental Jetset (Amsterdam)
Exhibition Design: Departamento del Distrito (Houston/Mexico City)
This program is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund; the William B. Coleman Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture; and the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series Fund.
Exhibitions at Rice
As a curatorial program of the Rice School of Architecture, Exhibitions at Rice uses the lens of design research to look at the world differently. Mobilizing a full spectrum of architectural representation—including drawing, imaging, making, and prototyping—this program weaves together scholarly inquiry, visual experimentation, and public engagement. Across all scales, from objects to buildings, cities, and the planet, Exhibitions at Rice engages the discipline of architecture as a cultural practice with a civic mandate, creating new discourses for both local and global audiences.