About Julien Lanoo architecture photography

Julien Lanoo is a Belgian photographer. He looks at the architectural world with a deep understanding of its historical and social layers as well as the visible and intangible connections between nature, light and materiality. Lanoo’s photographic career has covered such topics and fields as architecture, design, social integration, urban transformations and their dwellers.

His work has been exhibited widely, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Cité de l’architecture in Paris, MAXXI in Rome, Museo ICO, and the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, among others. He coauthored, together with Julien de Smedt, the book ‘Built Unbuilt’ revisiting 16 years of JDSA’s work (2017), and has contributed to monographic works such as ‘TANK’ (2018) and ‘Novartis Campus - Pavillon’(2023).

Since 2015, Julien has been photographing the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein for Vitra, resulting in publications and exhbitions such as ‘The Vitra Campus’(2016), ‘The Vitra Schaudepot’(2017), ‘Typecasting’ (2018), ‘The Vitra Campus: Architecture Design Industry’ (2020), ‘Kazuo Shinohara: The Umbrella House Project’ (2022), ‘Tane Garden House’ (2023), ‘Piet Oudolf At Work’ (2023), ‘Khudi Bari – a social project by Marina Tabassum Architects and its journey from Dhaka to Weil am Rhein’ (2025). Exhibitions at Vitra Design Museum featuring his work include « Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine », « Project Vitra – Design, Architecture, Communications (1950–2017) », « Garden Futures – Designing with Nature », « Tsuyoshi Tane: The Garden House ».

In 2018, this research was presented through his monographic exhibition In[Cognitus] at WAAO in Lille, France. In 2024, Julien was invited by architect Karim Nader to photograph Beirut through an analog lens, resulting in the exhibition Visions of Beirut, presented as part of WeDesign Beirut. Developed and printed by hand in his darkroom, these black-and-white photographs, alongside his ongoing documentation of The Line in Saudi Arabia and Centre Pompidou 2030, are held in private collections.

For over a decade, Julien has documented architecture and urban environments across the African continent, developing a body of work that explores how the built environment shapes communities, cultures, and everyday life. His photographic practice has engaged with a diverse range of contexts, from innovative architectural practices in Ghana – including the work of Bärbel Müller, DeRoche Projects, and Jürgen Benson-Strohmayer, [Applied] Foreign Affairs – to urban transformations in Côte d’Ivoire by Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, and socially driven housing initiatives such as the 110 Star Homes in Tanzania. Across his wider practice, Julien approaches architecture as a cultural and social practice, looking beyond the physical form of buildings to reveal the communities, histories, and environments that give them meaning.

Julien was a four-time nominee at the WAF Architectural Photography Awards in 2016 and was selected for the European Architectural Photography Prize in 2019. In 2021, his studio was named ‘World’s best architecture photography studio’ at the A+Firm Awards, organized by Architizer. In 2025, he received the Créateurs Design Awards (CDA) for Best Project Photography, alongside Lord Norman Foster and SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), who were awarded the Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award and Le Prix Charlotte Perriand, respectively. Most recently, his analog series documenting the 110 Star Homes in Mtwara, Tanzania, was nominated for Best Project Photography at the Architizer A+Awards and exhibited at Salone del Mobile in Milan, in an exhibition curated by the Royal Danish Academy.