DURING one three-week period recently Iwan Baan touched down in Amsterdam, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Milan, Rome, Tokyo, Medellín and Basel, where he photographed buildings designed by some of the world’s top architects, including Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito. Along with Steven Holl, Thom Mayne and the Japanese firm Sanaa, they have helped turn Mr. Baan, 34, into almost certainly the most peripatetic architectural photographer in the world as well as one of the most widely published.

Just five years after he took up architectural photography, Mr. Baan is “remaking the genre,” said Charles Renfro, a partner in Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for whom he has photographed projects like the High Line and the renovated Lincoln Center. For decades magazine editors, developers and architects themselves favored a static style of photography that framed buildings as pristine objects. Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling of chilly perfection. In its place he offers untidiness, of the kind that comes from real people moving though buildings and real cities massing around them.

Mr. Baan sees buildings as backdrops for his photographs of people, he said during a recent visit to New York. Looking at a picture of the new Cooper Union building in the East Village, designed by Mr. Mayne, Mr. Baan said, “It’s about the woman shuffling down the street.” His work owes as much to Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson as to Julius Shulman or Ezra Stoller, the pre-eminent architectural photographers of the late 20th century.

Image Iwan Baan

And where Shulman may be best known for exalting glass houses that hovered above Los Angeles, Mr. Baan often does the opposite, chartering helicopters to photograph buildings as small objects amid relentless urban sprawl. If Shulman and Stoller’s glorifying of pure form was an ideal match for the purist Modern architecture of their era, Mr. Baan’s conjuring of real life may be ideally suited to a time when architects like Mr. Koolhaas are creating buildings meant to absorb and reflect the messiness of 21st-century cities.