Photographer Julien Lanoo selected for the Creators Design Awards

Photographer Julien Lanoo is among the studios selected for the Creators Design Awards 2026 in the category Best Project – Photography, for his work on the Backyard Community Club, designed by DeRoche Projects in Accra, Ghana.

This selection recognises a project in which photography goes beyond documentation, actively contributing to a critical reading of an engaged architecture—one that is attentive to uses, materials and social contexts.

Julien Lanoo: an architectural gaze between history, society and materiality

Julien Lanoo approaches architecture with a deep understanding of its historical and social layers, as well as of the visible and intangible relationships between nature, light and materiality. His photographic practice spans a wide range of themes, including architecture, design, social integration, urban transformation and their inhabitants.

His work has been widely exhibited, notably at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, MAXXI in Rome and the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, among others. He co-authored, with Julien De Smedt, the book Built Unbuilt, revisiting 16 years of JDSA’s work (2017), and has contributed to monographs such as TANK (2018) and Novartis Campus – Pavilion (2023). Recent publications include Khudi Bari – a social project by Marina Tabassum Architects and its journey from Dhaka to Weil am Rhein (Vitra Design Museum, 2025) and Tane Garden House (2023).

Julien Lanoo was a four-time nominee for 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, organised by Architizer.

In 2025, he received the Creators Design Awards (CDA) for Best Project Photography, alongside Lord Norman Foster and SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), who were respectively honoured with the Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award and the Charlotte Perriand Prize. More recently, his analogue series documenting the 110 Star Homes in Mtwara, Tanzania, was nominated for Best Project Photography at the Architizer Awards, a distinction celebrating the world’s most inspiring architectural projects.

Backyard Community Club

In Accra, where public investment in recreational infrastructure remains limited and green spaces are increasingly scarce, the Backyard Community Club proposes an alternative approach to sports facilities. Centred on a tennis court, the project goes beyond its athletic function to become a shared space for collective life, bringing together sport, education, culture and ecological practices.

Designed by DeRoche Projects, the Backyard Community Club is the first project in Ghana to use a prefabricated, compacted raw-earth system. Developed by the practice, this technique reinterprets an ancestral material within a contemporary framework—one that is industrialisable and adaptable to a wide range of climatic and urban contexts.