Iwan Baan: Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses

In 2022, the American Academy in Rome organized From Las Vegas to Rome, an exhibition that revisited the relationship between Rome and Las Vegas through seventy photographs by Iwan Baan. Both cities carry heavily constructed images, and with them, polar assumptions: Las Vegas is surreal, thin, dishonest, new; Rome is authentic, thick, honest, ancient. The exhibition took a transnational look at resonances in architecture, urbanism and the social uses of space between two legendary cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic. 

In Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, Baan presents a curated selection of photographs made in 2022 and 2023, offering insight into both architecture and photography today. Fifty years after Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi's now canonical Learning From Las Vegas (1972), the images move from sky to street across both cities, revealing unexpected similarities and rediscovering Las Vegas's extravaganza in the streets of Rome. 

Baan's photographs contrast and subvert common perceptions of authenticity and artificiality, ultimately questioning such bipolar distinctions. In their dialogue, the images follow Scott Brown and Venturi's plea: first look, first understand, and only then judge. 

The accompanying book Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses, published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2024, includes contributions by Ryan Scavnicky, Lindsay Harris and Izzy Kornblatt.

Iwan Baan (*1975) is a Dutch architecture and documentary photographer based in Amsterdam. His photographs document the life of architecture around the world, from informal and traditional housing structures to the growth of megacities, and how individuals, communities and societies reappropriate their built environment to make it their own. Baan has worked with leading architects and architecture studios such as Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl and Tatiana Bilbao. His images are regularly published in newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Domus and Architectural Digest. Baan has authored or collaborated on many books, including among them Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024), African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence (Park Books, 2015/2022), Momentum of Light co-authored with Francis Kéré (2021), and Brasilia – Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (2010/2023). Baan's work has been exhibited internationally, including a touring retrospective exhibition launched at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein in 2023/2024.