Eero Saarinen’s 1965 War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, WI.
2All photos courtesy of Balthazar Korab
Eero Saarinen’s 1965 War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, WI.
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The spiral staircase inside Eero Saarinen’s GM Tech Center, Warren, MI, 1978.
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The spiral staircase inside Eero Saarinen’s GM Tech Center, Warren, MI, 1978.
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Saarinen’s Dulles Airport, Chantilly, VA (outside Washington, DC), 1961.
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Saarinen’s Dulles Airport, Chantilly, VA (outside Washington, DC), 1961.
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Dulles Airport
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Dulles Airport
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Inside Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK airport (1965) in New York City.
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Inside Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK airport (1965) in New York City.
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Saarinen’s Gateway arch in St. Louis.
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Saarinen’s Gateway arch in St. Louis.
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A more abstract view of the Gateway arch.
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A more abstract view of the Gateway arch.
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Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Apartment building (1951) in Chicago – in its urban, not so monumental context. Korab said about his photo: “It was a wet, snowy day, there were these beautiful tailfins of a Cadillac in the foreground, with the parking met
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Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Apartment building (1951) in Chicago – in its urban, not so monumental context. Korab said about his photo: “It was a wet, snowy day, there were these beautiful tailfins of a Cadillac in the foreground, with the parking met
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Yamasaki’s World Trade Center (1978), in its context of old New York.
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Yamasaki’s World Trade Center (1978), in its context of old New York.
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Again, Korab depicts the twin towers of the World Trade Center not as monumental modernist constructions in isolation, but in the midst of traditional buildings around them.
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Again, Korab depicts the twin towers of the World Trade Center not as monumental modernist constructions in isolation, but in the midst of traditional buildings around them.
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I.M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
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I.M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
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Saarinen’s John Deere headquarters, Moline, IL, 1963.
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Saarinen’s John Deere headquarters, Moline, IL, 1963.
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A detail of Saarinen’s John Deere headquarters shows how Korab, trained as an architect, deeply understood modernist architecture.
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A detail of Saarinen’s John Deere headquarters shows how Korab, trained as an architect, deeply understood modernist architecture.
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A modernist urban plaza, bleak in winter.
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A modernist urban plaza, bleak in winter.
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American car culture was paramount when Korab settled in Detroit in the mid 1950s. He photographed tailfins and other flourishes of automobile design frequently.
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American car culture was paramount when Korab settled in Detroit in the mid 1950s. He photographed tailfins and other flourishes of automobile design frequently.
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Cranbrook Academy of Art, where Korab documented Eliel Saarinen (Eero’s father)’s graceful campus and buildings. Sparely neo-classical, the campus was the academic setting for mid-century modernist study and experimentation by Charles and Ray Eames, Flor
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Cranbrook Academy of Art, where Korab documented Eliel Saarinen (Eero’s father)’s graceful campus and buildings. Sparely neo-classical, the campus was the academic setting for mid-century modernist study and experimentation by Charles and Ray Eames, Flor
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Rome, from the rooftops.
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Rome, from the rooftops.
There are a few architectural photographers whose names are nearly as well-known as those of the architects whose works they photograph. In this elite category is Balthazar Korab, who died January 15, 2013 at the age of 86. In his decades long career, he was especially important in helping popularize modernism, which was at first a radically new style unlike anything America had seen before.
Born in Hungary in 1926, Korab emigrated to France in 1949, when communism overtook his native country. He got a degree in architecture from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1954, worked in Paris for various architects (including Mr. Modernism himself, Le Corbusier), but fell in love with an American woman who was studying piano in Paris at the time. After they married in 1954, a visit to her family in Detroit, Michigan turned into a decision to settle there.
Detroit in the mid-20th century was home not only to the booming car culture, but also to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, sometimes called the “cradle of modernism.” Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Ralph Rapson, Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll and others had studied there. By the mid-50s, Saarinen (whose architect and educator father Eliel designed the campus and its original buildings and was instrumental in the experimentation at the school) had a successful practice in Detroit, and Korab got a job in his office. Saarinen is best known for his lyrically curving, expressionistic designs (like the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York, the Dulles Airport in Virginia, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch), and Korab’s photographs were a part of Saarinen’s design development and presentation.
Once working for Saarinen, Korab quickly became valued more for his photography than for his design work. Within a few years he left to set up his own architectural photography studio, and went on to make history documenting the buildings of his former employer and others over the next decades.
A slide show of Korab’s work is a visit to some of the most iconic works of modernist architecture in America, as well as a taste of the visual aesthetic those works represented.
