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Radu Tîrcă and Ștefania Hîrleață are students at University of Architecture and Urbanism 'Ion Mincu', Bucharest. At present, they lead their theoretical research on the subject of thermal towns and diploma projects in Govora Baths under the guidance of Stefan Simion, Irina Tulbure and Ilinca Paun Constantinescu. As students, they won second prize and best student project in a BeeBreeders international architecture competition - Mango Vynil Hub, third prize in a Zeppelin national competition - Prototip pentru comunitate, as well as other mentions in other competitions.
An interview with Bas Princen
The following interview was recorded via ZOOM on September 2nd, 2025. with the participation of Ștefan Simion and Irina Meliță.
SS: After graduating in architecture, you turned to photography. What drew you to it, and how did you experience that transition?
BP: I was photographing while studying Design for Public Space in Eindhoven, at the school that is now called the Design Academy. With quite an experimental approach to the idea of public space — not about designing a bench or an object to place in it, but about asking: What is public space? Does it still exist? And how can we define it?
While graduating, you had to propose a project yourself. I decided that I didn’t have to graduate only with what I’d been taught, but that I could start in a new direction. I had always liked designing very small iterations in public spaces, just to reroute people’s movement and make them use space in a different way. Then I realized I could photograph these small alterations. I could photograph a space in such a way that it was no longer simply reality, but proposed a certain use through the chosen view. You could exclude some things and create a focal point. It wasn’t that I was altering the pictures in Photoshop, or that I was staging things — it was about where you placed the focus. And when you put these imagined/depicted spaces next to each other, a certain possibility of uses starts to appear. It was an interesting experiment, and I decided to take an extra three months over the six that were given for the graduation project, because I felt it had a lot of potential and I needed to find the right way.
There was a long discussion about whether you could graduate with a kind of photographic proposal of a space as a design proposal. In the end, the jury, which included architects and an art curator, saw the potential of this way of seeing as being constructive for the wider field.
At that time, there was artistic photography within architecture and design publications. For instance, in Domus or, in Holland, de Architect, there was always a large section that was quite autonomous, about looking at the world through images — image essays by Andreas Gursky, Hans Aarsman, Bustamante, and Candida Höfer, or photographs meant to show the kind of world in which architecture is supposed to exist. I liked that. I liked this link: that you could propose something — not by doing architecture directly, but by showing the world, and still have an influence on the design or architectural discourse.
So that’s how I started to photograph. I did it on my own. I’m autodidact in that sense — I didn’t have training in photography. But it’s not so difficult as long as you have a clear subject. The technical understanding you can always learn.
After graduating, I realized I needed more substance for these works, or for the research I had started. I applied to The Berlage in Amsterdam, which at that time was a postgraduate architecture program. I was the only Dutch person there. Our focus was entirely on researching the city — not architecture itself. The main concern was how to define urbanity and what could be included in it.
There were lectures by Armin Linke and Gabriele Basilico, and also by Francesco Jodice. It was the time of Mutations, and Koolhaas was often there. Stefano Boeri was teaching and brought a couple of photographers with him as part of a research project he was doing called The Eclectic Atlases, in which you described the world from different angles and media, and photography was part of that. It was encouraging because I realized you could do something within the architectural cultural field without having to practice architecture directly.
I continued my research. I started in Eindhoven, talking to professors who understood more about the relationship between photography and architecture, or photography and urbanity, and how that could be defined. This helped me sharpen the project, and I added the second part of the work that I situated in the harbour of Rotterdam, which later became a book — my first publication, Artificial Arcadia. It’s about a set of landscapes in the Netherlands that are all man-made and artificial, and groups of people who find uses for these landscapes, usually some kind of leisurely activity. In my understanding, they were specific experts on the landscape. They could read it and value it for their use, and understand certain specifics of the landscape.
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Photograph from
Artificial Arcadia, Bas Princen, 2004.
In a way, they were more expert on the landscape than I was as a designer at the time. I decided to photograph them while I defined what kind of landscape was interesting, and they guided me to see why these new types of landscapes were a new frontier of certain publicness.
SS: You mentioned that at that time there was more artistic photography. Do you think that’s something that has been lost since then?
BP: Well, the support network has been lost — the one that used to make and distribute views on architecture and urbanism — meaning the many magazines that once existed and were quite autonomous. Domus, for example, had budgets to send Basilico to photograph a new building that interested them. They didn’t need to ask the architect, and therefore were not getting only the view approved by the architect. They could focus on an aspect they were invested in — for instance, how a work could be understood in the city, rather than as an object.
That’s one part. You already had a more critical — or at least potentially more critical — view. On top of that, these photographers or artists had a project of their own. Since the focus was not so much on objects, but on how they were embedded in the city fabric and the landscape, it all fit quite well. That whole world has now shifted and been absorbed into the art world, where architects either don’t go, or go for different reasons — not to be critical about their own practice. So I’d say there were many more possibilities then, because the cultural field was a bit wider than it is now. Would you agree, or do you have a counter-opinion?
IM: It’s different, I think. It’s more polarized or atomized.
SS: I tend to agree, but today everything is highly specialized across domains. Still, since everything is connected, I find it hard to say that the architectural cultural field is any less effervescent than in the past.
BP: Last Sunday I was at the Centre Pompidou, where Tillmans has a large show in an empty Pompidou, since they’re renovating it. He was given an entire floor, completely hollowed out, to present his works. I’ve seen quite a few of his shows and have many of his books, so I know his work well. What I found interesting is that many of his early works were magazine-based, editorial commissions — projects where you partly do what’s asked and partly what you think fits. These were not minor works; they made up a substantial part of his early practice.
This format allows a certain conversation, a critical stance, because you have to position yourself in relation to something else. I think, specifically, that aspect is challenged today. Now, everything has to come entirely from yourself, which is not necessarily difficult, but it just doesn’t automatically lead to the most productive or sharp results. There’s value in being asked to respond to something — to find an answer through a way of looking. That position pushes you to create in a meaningful way.
Today, you’re more likely asked to present a pre-formed idea, which is shown but not really discussed. I find the earlier model easier and more productive — it allows you to react and develop interesting answers, because there’s already a question from society or a larger context to engage with.
IM: So the role of editorial curation by big magazines is gone — why do you think that is?
BP: There’s no more budge to spare for this. Fewer magazines exist, and print runs are smaller. Other platforms have taken over, but they work differently, changing the dynamic.
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IM: Do you feel the same when you photograph for architects, for instance?
BP: I don’t do that very often. I mostly do it for OFFICE. With them, it’s a different story because we started out together, we’re good friends, and photographing the buildings is somewhat a collateral. It happens alongside the other things we do together. I know all their projects, so it’s also nice to see the projects develop as buildings in the end and how they relate to reality or to the initial sketches. There’s always a search for what the image should be, and with OFFICE that feels quite natural. They are always open to exploring what the final image of the building could be, rather than insisting on a predetermined outcome.
For other clients — whether institutions or architects — it’s usually a question that needs exploring. There isn’t a prescribed image; it’s more like: “Would you be interested in looking at this? We don’t know how to approach it, but maybe you can find a way.” That’s what makes it interesting for me. If there’s a question about the image that doesn’t have immediate answers, I’m eager to collaborate. When it’s just the task of “Can you photograph the building?” — then I’m not the right person. For me, there always has to be an image-related question. That’s the most important part.
SS: In the OFFICE monograph, I liked the part where Stefano Graziani shifts from speaking about architectural photography to photography and architecture — treating them as intersecting disciplines. He also raises the question of authorship in the result. In your collaboration with OFFICE, which is one of the topics of our lecture, how do you approach the projects? Do you discuss them in advance with Kersten or David, or do you prefer to discover the place directly, without knowing beforehand what to look for?
SOLO HOUSE – Matarraña, Office KGDVS, 2012-2017,
Photograph: Bas Princen.
BP: It’s a very natural process. I’m at OFFICE maybe three times a year, so I see all the new projects—the ones that move forward and the ones that don’t. There are models, collages on the wall, and we always go quickly over what’s in progress. In that sense, I roughly know the projects from conception to execution. So when I photograph them, I already have some familiarity with them.
SS: Does it happen to discuss the ongoing project?
BP: A lot of times we go there together. The way I photograph does not take very long. The weather is not important — the weather is the weather. The moment of the day is given. It’s like visiting the building: you’re there for maybe two hours, and you photograph it. In a way, I focus on the things that interest me and the things that remind me of earlier projects or of projects still in progress. We always try to create a link between previous projects and those that follow. Then, during the editing, we talk about what is most essential — what can be left out and what cannot.
IM: I liked what you said about proposing alternative views or uses of public space through new ways of seeing them. Do you think this approach also applies to architecture?
BP: I think photography, for me, is always like that. I photograph something because it reminds me of something, or because I want to tell something else that isn’t happening at that moment. I have no prescribed plan at all. And I don’t want to photograph a view I’ve already photographed before, or re-photograph it just because the weather wasn’t perfect the first time. That never works — then it becomes almost like a drawing, which you have to redraw again and again.
For me, it’s really about the moment when you’re there: a certain aspect of the building makes an impact. And if you’re there at another time, in another light or with different weather, another aspect makes an impact. It can also be about how it’s used, or if someone is using it. So it’s a reaction to the moment and the space. And that’s it. I can’t do it any other way.
IM: It can even surprise the architects who conceived it, which I find really nice—a new way of seeing.
BP: Yes, I think it’s also interesting for them to see my take, because there are things photographed that they hadn’t really noticed or focused on before. But it can also happen that things very important to them I don’t fully capture. So it goes both ways. Normally, though, they’re fine with that.
SS: When photographing a building, is the process different from a photographic project where you put together a series of images, or is it similar?
BP: It is different, but when you work on both over a long period, it almost stops being a ‘project’ and becomes a constant element you can add to. Sometimes, for certain buildings, one photograph is enough because it fits within the context of other images, and nothing more needs to be said. It shouldn’t be overly artistic — that’s unnecessary. The work is collaborative, and it has a goal: to communicate the building. This isn’t about my project on architecture, but their architecture. It comes back to the question of the image — finding a way to represent their idea of architecture over time.
SS: How long have you collaborated with OFFICE?
BP: Since the beginning.
SS: Do you remember how you met?
BP: Well, we met in the Berlage Institute — Kersten did not study there — but he was working at Maxwan and at Neutelings Riedijk, so he was in Rotterdam and came to the lectures or for other reasons. So that’s where we met. I can’t remember exactly. When they were building their first project, they were doing The Notary on the side and David was still working for Xaveer de Geyter, I think.
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Office Entrance – Antwerp, Office KGDVS, 2002-2005, Photograph: Bas Princen.
We were already friends, and we were joking a little bit: “Okay, I’ll photograph The Notary, but if I photograph it, I’ll photograph everything you’ll ever do.” So that’s, in a way, how it started.
SS: For a broader perspective, your collaboration extended over 20 years.
BP: In the beginning it was really a lot more about looking at each other’s works and in a way also being inspired by it. Our fields overlap, but they are not the same. I think there was a mutual respect for each other’s work. When I say the photography is collateral, it’s literally like that — so there are other reasons why we engage with each other’s work, because there’s something to learn from that.
SS: You describe a very natural encounter with the places you photograph, yet your images are powerful and transcend the immediate subject. If taking a photograph feels effortless, does that mean you spend considerable time afterward reflecting on the series, reviewing the images, and carefully selecting which to keep? Does this approach also apply to series like the Reservoir and to your work photographing for OFFICE?
BP: Working digitally has changed things a lot. Now I take many more photographs, since there’s no need to be as careful with each shot. When I had only ten negatives in a day, I had to be sure before taking one. Back then, I would set up the camera, look through it, and decide yes or no — most often no. Now I record the view and decide later. Still, the process hasn’t really changed: something catches my interest, or I recognize a reference in my mind, then I set the camera to see if that idea is still visible in the picture. That’s the magic — sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. You may have a clear idea when you see something, but that doesn’t guarantee it will work in the image.
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Reservoir Series — Valley (Jing’an), 2007
Photograph: Bas Princen.
And sometimes it is the other way around: you sense that something is there but can’t quite figure it out. You set up the camera, take the photograph, and then look at the image — not at the reality, not at the context. You just look at the picture and think: “Now it somehow works” — once the context is removed and what interests me comes forward. This doesn’t require long preparation. To achieve a powerful or even monumental photograph doesn’t necessarily take much time; it’s a moment of realization. You walk with the camera, often already on the tripod. When there’s a reason to stop, you stop. And when you realize why you stopped, that is exactly when I need to photograph it. I don’t take five more shots in the same place; there was a reason I stopped there, and that’s what should be captured.
The image creates a reference, linking it to something you’ve seen before — perhaps some of my own works or something from the history of image-making. There’s a certain resonance between reality and your mind that you have to accept, not manipulate. You need to be clear that the reason you stopped is the reason you stopped, and that’s what you have to photograph.
SS: I wanted to ask about this idea of reference you mentioned. As you explained, it seems more like an internal process — a kind of resonance — rather than a postmodern gesture of pointing to a specific reference or citation. That’s what explains how you arrived at that image in that moment.
BP: No, I never say, “Today I want to reference this.” No, it doesn’t work like that at all. It’s much more fluid, and therefore editing can be difficult. Sometimes it can take a few years before pictures make sense, because they don’t fit in a series yet, don’t have a proper “neighbor,” or don’t immediately show what they reference. But the initial reason, while photographing, is always what I need to return to and try to make visible for others.
IM: I was wondering, what is your current obsession, or what do you want to capture? Where do you want to point your camera now?
BP: This will be a long answer, and it will touch on a couple of questions you’ve already asked. Three years ago, we curated a big show on photography at CCA, together with Stefano Graziani. CCA has an amazing photography archive because Phyllis Lambert realized that when you want to make an archive of architecture, you also need an archive of reality, or of context: “Where does this architecture live? Where does it belong?” So while acquiring the architectural archive, she also acquired a parallel archive of photography. She collects complete photographic projects by photographers and artists, focusing on the built environment, as archive prints, not as exhibition prints.
The archive is quite large and has its challenges. Since the late ’90s, it hasn’t grown much, so most of the collection comes from earlier periods. When we were asked to create a project based on their archive, we had to understand why the idea of the “photographic project” was important and why the museum wasn’t collecting large prints. We realized something similar in both Stefano’s and my photography: the project always exists, but usually only in books. You’re rarely asked to show a complete project in an exhibition because it’s impossible to display, say, 50 large prints. So the complete project lives primarily in the book.
And the complete project, as we understand it — I think Stefano and I are quite similar on this — and what we chose as the subject of the exhibition, is that the project is an argument. A visual argument, not written down, but a proposal for how to see reality or an aspect of it, made by an artist or photographer using only images or sequences of images. With that, you can say something quite powerful — a visual argument — and it can take many forms. In the exhibition, we explored these forms.
We went into the archive and selected about ten projects. Then we asked ten photographers and artists we already knew to explain and expand on their own projects. These were artists who could have fit naturally into the collection but weren’t yet represented. We also added nine new projects that we thought would work well if collected.
While doing this, I think we both began to realize — I certainly did — that documentation is important, and that the notion of documentary photography is changing and becoming relevant again. Fifteen or ten years ago, I would never have called my work documentary. But now, in an age where images circulate online, are not fixed, and are subject to minor alterations — whatever the algorithms do — the idea of the document is becoming more important again. The document, as a print or as an archival object, can exist online, but it should definitely exist offline. So, in a way, this is a long introduction to the work I’m doing now.
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SS: Just as a side note: why must it exist physically, offline as well?
BP: Photography has always been an object. And when it’s an object, it fixes itself in time — you can see when it was made, which gives it a certain significance. We used to have negatives, and that was the moment of creation — the object itself — before printing. When I say “object,” I don’t mean the exhibition print; the old object was the negative. It indicated when something was documented.
When images remain entirely digital, I’m not convinced they can hold that moment in time. You can’t pinpoint them, and they’re subject to change. I think this is one of the most interesting challenges. That’s why my archive is offline; the server is offline. It’s not that I don’t trust digital storage, but I believe there’s a responsibility for the photographer: documenting something also involves archiving it and ensuring it can be seen in the future. It’s not strictly necessary, but the work should serve as study material. So when I say the print is still important, I mean the archive print. It should exist in my archive, or somewhere it can be understood as an object created at a certain time, with a certain view.
If we go back to Tillmans, the magazines functioned in a similar way. The moment of publication was also the moment when the photography belonged somewhere and was archived — an almost instant record through the magazine.
SS: I was thinking exactly about this — I can’t settle for accessing architecture digitally. When something truly interests me, I feel the need to have the physical book to engage with it fully. Sometimes I wonder if I’m anachronistic, given how easily information flows online and how many magazines sell PDFs. Yet, to me, a physical book operates on another level. A friend even calls it a “fetish,” but reflecting on what you said, I recognize my instinct in it.
BP: In my understanding, the book — especially in photography — is the only place where you can grasp the full project, or what we would call the visual argument. The complete argument exists only in the book; it doesn’t exist online, where there’s only a selection of the work.
SS: In architecture, even plans and drawings are increasingly treated as images that can be consulted and understood in great detail.
BP: Yes, and I think we need to start understanding these things as important documents — I believe that’s the only way to truly understand them. They might seem a little like a fetish, but I don’t see them that way. I see them as documents, and with documents comes a certain duty.
SS: I also appreciate the importance of limits. Online content flows endlessly, while a book is a curated, finite document with clear physical boundaries.
BP: Coming back to your question — what am I working on now — last year we spent a year in Singapore with the family. We had also lived there ten years ago, and it was during that first stay that I began a project. At the time, I was observing the city but didn’t relate to it and found it uninteresting to document. That period also marked my shift from analog to digital photography. I realized I no longer wanted to photograph cities and urbanity. Photography can always promote an idea or highlight a virtue, but these cities didn’t need validation, even if some aspects remained compelling. This shift helped me rethink what I wanted to focus on after fifteen years of documenting cities and landscapes.
With digital photography, I also wanted to move away from obsessing over composition and perfect organization. I wanted to photograph more freely — not abandoning monumentality, but personally challenging the predictability of my own approach, which had become too familiar to me. I already knew how a photograph would look before taking it, and that predictability had made the process uninteresting.
I began photographing artifacts — material objects or buildings that might disappear — and approached them in a very specific way. At the same time, I was interested in nature, but as a counterpoint to urbanity rather than in a National Geographic sense.
One key example is the Studiolo del Duca in Urbino. I photographed the intarsia walls at a one-to-one scale. These depictions are architectural or embedded within architecture. I printed them on very matte paper, without gloss or glass. By making the prints life-sized, the usual layers separating viewer and image disappear, creating a direct, human-scale encounter. I developed a set of 15–20 works, shown at Vitra in the exhibition Image and Architecture.
Buildings like this can be lost forever, which makes photographing them especially urgent. In reality, these objects are already monumentalized; entering the space carries the weight of history. I wanted to free that perception, creating works that allow viewers to engage with something important in relation to architectural imagery, or images embedded within architecture.
SS: This process is fascinating — how you chose this specific type of paper, and how you spoke of its relationship to reality. It feels like a work of art in itself. I wonder, though: is it still documentary, or does the relationship to reality become merely a background reference?
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Studiolo del Duca,
Bas Princen, 2016, Image and Architecture Exhibition, Vitra Design Museum Gallery, 2018 .
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BP: It’s very documentary, because in the end it could also be understood as a scientific object. It’s photographed perfectly, at one-to-one scale or close to it. You can sense the materiality and get an idea of the experience of being there. So yes, I think it’s quite documentary — it just doesn’t take the conventional form. We aren’t used to recognizing that as documentary, which is part of what makes the image interesting: it raises questions about how we consume and understand images.
On a side note, I wanted to create works that can’t be experienced on a phone, where the shiny, small screen misses so many elements. I tried to make a work that, when photographed and shown to a friend, would make them ask, “Why is this interesting?”
IM: Does this approach work with nature as well?
BP: I started photographing nature as part of a larger project: 17 volcanoes in Java — currently the most densely populated landmass, highly urbanized. The volcanoes, of which there are many, are like holes in the urban landscape. When you ascend one, you enter what could be called nature, but it’s a nature that will inevitably change — maybe not disappear completely, but it will transform. There’s a reason to document it, to photograph it, or simply to observe it. There are around 50 works in this series, of which only three, I think, have ever been exhibited. I returned to Singapore to add to the series and explore further possibilities.
As nature photographs, these images have limits. They can quickly be read as almost romantic, which is not the intention — and that’s fine, but it’s not the main point. Until now, the works have mostly been exhibited as monumental images. That approach is valid, but I realized it has limitations. The show at CCA taught me that a project can be more open, not just the five or ten iconic images that are always repeated. I’m now working in a more archival way, including many more pictures.
For this nature series — though I hesitate to even call it that — I am documenting parts of the landscape that might change, disappear, or are under forces driving transformation. Last year, I began adding small image stories to the series. For example, in the mountain villages near the volcanoes in Java, there are old wooden houses, somewhat like Japanese houses, which locals call “jungle houses” (though that’s not their real name). They are built without nails, just fitted together, and are beautiful objects. Traders buy them, take them to workshops to clean, repair, and replace rotten parts, then sell them as luxury cultural artifacts to art collectors in Jakarta, who place them in their gardens as pavilions. This is a very local practice; it’s not driven by foreign buyers.
I’ve been photographing these small narratives of the original objects — moments of disassembly, repair, reassembly, and transport. I turn them into stories of six or seven small-scale images, printed as small archive prints that can be displayed in a vitrine, for example. There are now 10–15 of these side stories, showing how artifacts and nature intersect. The artifacts are no longer captured as perfect objects; like the landscapes, they are transient, transforming, and it’s important to consider how we treat them. In the end, it’s very documentary.
I don’t yet know how to exhibit this work or how it will appear in books. It’s a body of work I’m printing now. In Singapore, I also spent a year photographing clouds from our balcony, anticipating that AI-generated images could never truly recreate them — or at least, there would be no reason for them to. Yet photographing them makes sense.
IM: When you explore these subjects, do you sometimes draw on historical approaches or ideas?
BP: History is always there because photography is full of these kinds of precedents.
IM: Or does geography, or a specific place, influence your approach?
BP: Yes, in this case, it’s all Indonesia, and there’s a reason for that — Indonesia was a Dutch colony. I also feel there’s a certain obligation to work on it. Contrary to what everyone might say — that you shouldn’t touch it — I actually think there is an obligation to deal with it. I’ve also been collecting pictures of Indonesia by Dutch photographers, who were commissioned by companies, the Dutch society, or the Dutch government. These photographs aimed to understand what the landscape could offer at the time. But they are interesting as objects, and they also tell the story of that landscape. All of these photographs are kept in archives in Holland, so I think my work has to relate to that as well.
SS: Do you keep the archive in your studio? Given how much you travel, what is the importance of having a studio and access to your archive?
BP: The studio is like an artist’s workspace. For me most photographers are studio artists in that sense: most of the work — the thinking, the experiments — happens here. We’re actually photographing only a small portion of the time, maybe 10% of my time.
SS: Yes, I saw a beautiful photo of your studio in one of your lectures, which I really liked, also for its industrial setting.
BP: There are two studios. I live in Switzerland now, on behalf of my family. In our house, I have a basement that serves as the studio — it has a domestic scale, so it feels more like an office, an office full of piles of pictures. Here, I do much more thinking: I make prints, run tests, and produce archive prints.
Then there’s the old studio in Rotterdam, where the archive is kept and the large works are stored. It’s a big industrial space where you can really understand what a monumental work would look like in a museum exhibition. There’s a huge difference between testing a museum-scale work at home and seeing it in its intended space. You can’t rely on large prints at home to grasp how the work will function; the feeling is completely different. You need the proper scale to understand how the work interacts with the space, and I think that’s part of the work itself. You have to consider how the viewer will encounter it in an exhibition — you’re not thinking about how it would look in a house. Normally, works are experienced either in books or in exhibitions.
SS: Do you still have a darkroom in the studio?
BP: I never had a darkroom because I never photographed in black and white, and a color darkroom is very complex. There was one at school where I could print, and for a while, some colleagues and I had such a color darkroom in Rotterdam. After that, everything shifted to digital very quickly — you’d scan the negative and then print it. I think it’s valuable to have the experience of printing color in a darkroom because it’s very complex and quite different from black and white. But I can’t even remember how long it’s been since the process stopped being a wet one and became dry, digital.
SS: I wanted to ask you about the “gray pages” in the OFFICE KGDVS monograph. It seems to me that many of the interests you just discussed — your personal projects and your way of looking at the world — are reflected there. Interestingly, in consulting their three-book monograph, I haven’t found any specific explanation of what the “gray pages” are. What purpose do they serve within the book?
BP: You’ll have to ask Kersten. I don’t know if you’ve already spoken to him, but that’s where you should start. In a way, it was their inception of making a monograph — or not even a monograph, more like an ongoing catalogue raisonné. Why include these gray pages? I have an idea, but you should ask Kersten.
I think it’s always important to show work the way you want it to be seen. It’s the same for me when I make my own book — I decide how it will be presented. When work appears in a magazine, a group exhibition, or elsewhere, a curator decides how people will interpret it, so that’s already different. The same applies to architectural monographs. You can have an El Croquis or an a+u, but your own catalog doesn’t have to follow the same rules. You can choose what’s important and how you want to present which parts of the work matter and how they should be looked at.
If I take it a step back to my own practice, I think you make images so that they can be embedded in a history of images. My images don’t exist by themselves — they are surrounded by historic images, by works of other photographers, other artists. My images should situate themselves within a world of existing images.
So if you ask me what the “gray pages” are, they are images, projects, ideas, and thoughts that provide the context in which the works should be understood. It’s a curated context, and that’s fine. What interests me is that they fix certain ideas at a certain time. The pictures I made appear in the “gray pages” alongside projects by OFFICE at the same moment, so you can see similarities or influences across works. They also cement the architectural projects within a certain visual thinking of that moment — of OFFICE, of Kersten and David, or however you interpret it — but essentially, it’s a document of the wider context in which these projects were created. I would still say my explanation is a bit limited, but that’s how I understand it.
The Construction of an Image, Bas Princen, Bedford Press, 2015.
IM: I’m curious — and not sure if it’s a bit risky — but how would you position yourself toward, or critique, the work of a very different photographer, Martin Parr? What are your thoughts on his work?
BP: Well, we could talk about many photographers, and Martin Parr is clearly very different from me. But when I look at his work professionally, I understand exactly what he’s doing. I’m quite impressed by how he does it and by the consistency of his work.
What impresses me most — what usually impresses me about photographers — is that they reveal something about reality that everyone can see, but no one noticed. That’s amazing. You look at these pictures and think: “I know these people, I’ve seen this,” yet while looking at them, you realize: “Actually, it’s much stranger than I thought when I encountered it in reality.” In a way, that’s the essence of a visual argument.
There are many ways to understand photographers in this sense. You can look at a work and think: “I didn’t see this,” or “I didn’t see it like this.” It’s interesting that I now know how to look at something photographed by someone else. And another thought I often have is: “Ah, great — someone else did it. I don’t have to do it anymore.”
IM: Do you think he also brings a critical eye to his subjects?
BP: It’s both. It’s a kind of love and critique. You have to have a love for it; otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to do it for so long. There has to be a certain fascination or love — it can’t be only irritation or critique. That’s also why I tend to prefer longer projects: they require real investment. It can’t be just a quick critique, a quick snap.
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SS: As a photographer, you produce physical objects, as you’ve mentioned. You also seem interested in creating a particular kind of place — suspended somewhere between imagination and reality — where photography doesn’t just depict reality, but produces new images and creates new spaces. Can you tell us about your work on the Pavilions, a long-standing collaboration with OFFICE?
BP: For OFFICE, these interventions are small, allowing them to experiment quickly and test an idea. For me, they are very large projects where I have to let go of certain tediousness, and they are more prescribed, so you can’t control everything. I find this fascinating — the way image and space are tested together. This is a collaboration we’re both invested in: “How far can you push this?” “Can you do this or not?”
In 2012 we conceived the circular pavilion for the Shenzhen Biennale. Then, there’s The Room of Peace, which is done solely by me and was first shown as an exhibition-installation at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s already one of the first artifacts.
Wall Pavilion – Shenzhen, Office KGDVS and Bas Princen, 2013-2014, Shenzhen Biennial, Photograph: Bas Princen.
“Room of Peace”, Bas Princen, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Photograph: Bas Princen.
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After Singapore, this was the first idea of making these copies and describing the space. I used a Japanese very matte paper, for a one to one photograph. There’s also a booklet in parallel.
The Model for a Pavilion came as an artistic reaction to Cedric Price’s unbuilt project, The Potteries Thinkbelt. It was meant to be a kind of railroad university set within a Becher-style industrial landscape. I went there to photograph the site, which is now just an overgrown railway. In the end, this hidden architectural element — Cedric Price’s Thinkbelt site — became the subject of our object. And for us, the hidden question was: “How can you make a space without solid materials? Can you build it from a very thin image?” The result was a beautiful space that, at first, seemed almost postmodern — with large arcade windows and a narrow ramp. But once it was hanging, you would pass under a perfect black void. It was striking.
At Vitra, I was really trying to understand this possibility of photography and architecture — trying to depict moments where the two collide, where architecture and image become one, intricately connected to each other.
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Potteries Thinkbelt Project, Cedric Price, United Kingdom (Staffordshire), 1964, Unbuilt.
Model for a pavilion, Bas Princen, Office KGDVS, 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Photograph: Bas Princen.
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BP: Model for a Tower, created with OFFICE as part of an art route commemorating Pieter Bruegel in Belgium. The main museum in Rotterdam holds Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, the smallest of three versions worldwide. To begin, I needed special permission to photograph the painting — a process closely supervised by its guardian.
From these photographs, I extracted sequences of buildings and details. Bruegel’s painting itself is a layered time frame: kilns and industry on the left, ghostly figures and nature on the right. I was struck by his precision — leaves and bricks painted at the same scale, one green, one red — a subtle critique in itself. And in the background, cleared forests and arriving building materials reveal the dystopian landscape left in the wake of the tower’s construction. From these fragments, I built a new narrative within the painting.
Model for a Tower, Bas Princen, Office KGDVS, Dilbeek, Belgium, 2018, Photograph: Bas Princen.
We then imagined a circular structure of slender poles, with the pictures suspended from them — a kind of proposal for an object that might one day exist (though it never truly would). Our idea was to place it in a forest, but this meant mapping every tree. The task was far more complex than expected: we had to locate a perfect circle untouched by trunks. From the outside, the silver structure was clearly visible; from the inside, it seemed to vanish.
IM: This is so beautiful.
BP: These pavilions are important experiments because they bridge two worlds we move between: architecture and art. They show that these worlds have always been connected, and in a way, we need to keep reconnecting them. Frescoes and wall murals, for instance, were once integral to architecture — at least until a certain point. Even in early modernism, the Bauhaus curriculum still included wall painting. Only later did this connection begin to fade, and with it, the understanding that an image could be part of architecture. These experiments are also a way of asking: “Can we bring back the possibility of the image as an essential part of how we understand space?“
BP: There’s a tower in the harbor of Antwerp that once belonged to the village of Wilmarsdonk. In the 1960s, three polder villages — churches included — were erased to extend the harbor. Just before demolishing Wilmarsdonk’s church, they realized that without its tower there would be no fixed point from which to measure the expansion. This was before GPS, so they decided to keep the tower as a reference. The rest was buried under two or three meters of sand, and the harbor grew around it.
When I found it, the tower stood on a small plot, completely enclosed by industrial halls and containers. By the 1990s, it had no monumental status, only the condition that it couldn’t be destroyed. The harbor company, as owner, had to keep it from collapsing, nothing more. It wasn’t considered important architecture, just an artifact of history. Eventually, they decided to stabilize it and asked five artists to propose how it might be made into an “experiential object” for the harbor.
I spent weeks with the tower, questioning what makes an artifact important if it isn’t monumental architecture. I found it strange that a 450-year-old tower had to serve as a backdrop to glorify a 40-year-old harbor. To me, the harbor felt temporary — it has been there for only 40 years and may last another 20 before something else replaces it. So I proposed not to monumentalize the harbor but to shield the tower, using photography.
I photographed it one-to-one, as an artifact, before renovation began — capturing the patina and details that would soon disappear. Using scaffolding, I went up to record the surfaces, later erasing the scaffolding from the images to produce perfect one-to-one prints of the tower as it was. Some elements, like a rotten wooden beam, would vanish in renovation, so the photographs preserve what was about to change.
I also excavated the old zero level, since 1.10–1.20 meters of sand had buried part of the tower’s base. Using the cadaster map, I marked its original plot and created a small inner garden to assert its place. Around it, I proposed a circular protective installation of 14 large-scale photographs.
This work also questions a dogma of photography: you rarely encounter photographs of the very place you are standing, because images usually transport you elsewhere. Here, the photographs act instead as a transplantation of time, preserving the tower just before its renovation. Finally, I suggested reopening the back of the church to allow people to walk through, even though the tower itself could no longer be entered.
SS: Is the frame something important to your idea of producing these objects?
BP: Yes, this was all designed by me — including the frame. It enhances the relationship with the harbor. It needed a strong color: one that, in a way, integrates with the surroundings, yet is not found in the harbor — a color that complements it.
IM: It’s very beautiful in contrast with what is around it.
BP: It’s a very strange project, but what I learned — or what I found interesting — is that it’s always this kind of question about the image: “What can an image do?”. Or, more specifically, “What can it still do?”. By now, we might say it can’t do much anymore, that there are too many images. But I still believe the image can do a lot. What was very interesting is that when people visit and look at the pictures — that the images become the reality of the tower. It’s not the renovated tower that exists in their mind. All the elements you saw in the pictures are gone: the slates have been replaced by black slates instead of purple, the wooden frames inside have been fully clad in metal to prevent collapse — everything has disappeared. Yet, by doing this installation, the tower is now fixed in the moment when I photographed it. That’s the tower that exists — not the one physically next to the visitor. I didn’t anticipate this, and it turned out to be a very interesting outcome.
SS: It’s fascinating how an image can be drawn from reality and then reinserted into it in a new, tangible form.
BP: Yes. I think it still makes sense to make images. It’s not obsolete.
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1 - Bas Princen, Artificial Arcadia, ed. Ed van Hinte (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004).
2 - Wolfgang Tillmans, Nothing Could Have Prepared Us –Everything Could Have Prepared Us, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2025).
3 - Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Antwerp Office Interiors, Antwerp, Belgium, 2002–2005. Photographs by Bas Princen.
4 - Bas Princen, Reservoir series, 2007.
5 - The Lives of Documents: Photography as Project, exhibition, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Main Galleries, May 3, 2023–April 7, 2024, curated by Stefano Graziani and Bas Princen.
6 - Bas Princen. “Image and Architecture,” exhibition at Vitra Design Museum Gallery, February 24 – August 5, 2018, Weil am Rhein, Germany.
7 - 17 Volcanoes: Works by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, Armin Linke, Bas Princen, U5, and Wermke/Leinkauf,” exhibition, September 29, 2016, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada; February 10–March 15, 2017, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, NJ, United States.
8 - Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt Project, Staffordshire, England, 1964–66.
9 - Bas Princen, Image and Architecture, February 24–August 5, 2018, Viatra Design Museum Gallery.
10 - Bas Princen, Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. Model for a Tower, Dilbeek, Belgium, 2018.
11 - Bas Princen, Art Rehabilitation of the Wilmarsdonk Tower, 2019-2024; execution assistance by Office.