Photography for Jonas

Jonas

Orange Architects designed Jonas for developer Amvest. It holds a BREEAM Outstanding certification, the highest sustainability rating a building can achieve, and it’s genuinely striking to look at too. The building takes its environmental credentials as seriously as its design ambition. Orange Architects tasked us to capture that sustainable architecture in a series of photographs.

From outside, Jonas reads as a single sculptural mass. A dark, irregular façade wraps 273 homes into one lozenge-shaped volume overlooking the marina. Photographing the exterior meant capturing that scale, the material honesty, and the way light shifts across the façade through the day. It also meant showing how the building holds its own against the water and quayside that inspired it.

The real surprise is inside. A series of trusses, built like the skeleton of a traditional wooden ship, carves out generous shared hollows. These spaces turn IJburg’s newest residents into an actual community, not just neighbours who happen to share a building. Public routes wind through a living room, a cinema, and other collective spaces that blur the line between private homes and shared amenity. The real brief behind this shoot was to capture that shift: from a bold, almost fortress-like exterior to an interior built entirely around connection.

For us, architectural photography means showing how a building’s environmental ambition and its design actually work together, not two separate stories. With Jonas, that meant photographing both registers in the same series: the structural confidence outside, the warmth and community-first thinking within.

Interested in sustainable architectural photography for your own project? Explore our architecture services or get in touch to discuss your building.