Balthazar Korab

Balthazar Korab's recent passing at the age of eighty-six was met by a deep appreciation for his work and a tremendous outpouring of affection for his gentle spirit. As one of the most prolific and celebrated architectural photographers, Korab captured images as graceful and elegant as his subjects. His iconic photographs for master architects immortalized their finest works, while leaving his own indelible impact on twentieth-century visual culture. Now available in paperback, John Comazzi's riveting illustrated biography traces Korab's circuitous path from a forced exodus from his native Hungary to an architectural education at the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and emigration to the United States, where he launched his career as Eero Saarinen's on-staff photographer. Balthazar Korab includes a portfolio of more than one hundred images from Korab's commissioned architectural photography as well as close examinations of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal and the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana.

Cranbrook is an estate that became a set of schools and cultural institutions. This work shows readers that Cranbrook is an assemblage of great architecture in which the whole is even more than the sum of the parts. It aims to capture not only the beauty and delight in the buildings and public art of Cranbrook but the meaning of the place itself.

In many different parts of the world modern furniture elements have served as material expressions of power in the post-war era. They were often meant to express an international and in some respects apolitical modern language, but when placed in a sensitive setting or a meaningful architectural context, they were highly capable of negotiating or manipulating ideological messages. The agency of modern furniture was often less overt than that of political slogans or statements, but as the chapters in this book reveal, it had the potential of becoming a persuasive and malleable ally in very diverse politically charged arenas, including embassies, governmental ministries, showrooms, exhibitions, design schools, libraries, museums and even prisons. This collection of chapters examines the consolidating as well as the disrupting force of modern furniture in the global context between 1945 and the mid-1970s. The volume shows that key to understanding this phenomenon is the study of the national as well as transnational systems through which it was launched, promoted and received. While some chapters squarely focus on individual furniture elements as vehicles communicating political and social meaning, others consider the role of furniture within potent sites that demand careful negotiation, whether between governments, cultures, or buyer and seller. In doing so, the book explicitly engages different scholarly fields: design history, history of interior architecture, architectural history, cultural history, diplomatic and political history, postcolonial studies, tourism studies, material culture studies, furniture history, and heritage and preservation studies. Taken together, the narratives and case studies compiled in this volume offer a better understanding of the political agency of post-war modern furniture in its original historical context. At the same time, they will enrich current debates on reuse, relocation or reproduction of some of these elements.

A beautifully designed resource that takes readers on a tour of greater Detroit's many architectural wonders and special landmarks.

Reproductions of O'Keeffe's works highlight this examination of the artist's life, including her place in the American tradition and her return to the rural subjects of her childhood

In this award-winning book noted photographer Balthazar Korab creates a fascinating new game--find the letters of the alphabet in, on and around American buildings ranging from Victorian gingerbread to angular lines of steel. Every letter can be found in architecture either as a basic structural form or as a decorative, eye-catching detail added on as the inspiration of the architect or the whim of the builder. The words of famous architectural observers from Goethe to Wright and from Victor Hugo to Robert Venturi are carefully paired with dramatic photos to produce an exciting array of ideas about what architecture can be.

A long-awaited survey of the full range of Stoller's stunning photography

An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.