New buildings seem to sprout up nowadays with no more effort than mushrooms need to carpet the forest floor. And unlike the typical buildings that went up in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, many of the new buildings are architecturally distinguished. It is appropriate, therefore, that Danziger Projects has as its current exhibition “Ezra Stoller: Buildings of New York” to remind us of the city’s last period of distinguished building, the middle decades of the 20th century, and of the brilliant photographer who memorialized them.

Ezra Stoller (1915–2004) is widely considered to be the greatest architectural photographer of the 20th century. Even before receiving his degree in architecture from New York University in 1939, he had begun to earn a living by taking pictures of other people’s projects. After serving in the Army during World War II, he quickly established a reputation that made him the photographer of choice for almost all the most prominent architects of his time. The list includes Frank Lloyd Wright Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, and Richard Meier Many architects did not consider a building to be complete until Stoller had photographed it

They valued Stoller because he grasped their intentions, and could present them in their purest form. He achieved this by hard work. He insisted on studying the blueprints of a building before he began work, and on spending time, often days, walking through it. Sometimes he ejected the tenants so he could inhabit the structure without being disturbed. He observed his subject buildings in varying lighting conditions and at different hours of the day until he knew precisely what he wanted, and then he waited patiently until the optimal moment came. The pictures that resulted from all this effort were something like the Platonic ideal of the building. Time and again he found ways to expose a building’s soul.

Stoller’s career coincided with the flourishing of the International style and Modernism, and much of our understanding of those movements derives from his images. Danziger Projects has up three pictures from 1958 of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue at 52nd Street, one of the movement’s classic iterations. This elegant steel and glass homage to the beauty of the rectangle was designed by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, and had an enormous influence on subsequent corporate architecture.

Stoller’s first picture was taken from a building across Park Avenue and to the north. Its details are characteristically in focus through all the planes of the picture, and the camera was precisely arranged to eliminate any vertical parallax, the tendency of parallel lines to appear to converge. The front of the building and the open plaza area are in bright sunlight, and the side of the building and Park Avenue are in shadow, so the structure is seen rising up in sharp relief from its surroundings.

The second picture was taken at night with the camera lower down and more to the south. The lights are all on so we see the delicate tracery of the building’s grid in silhouette, and the light from the lobby reflected in the pool emphasizes its aqueous nature. The top of the frame cuts the building off midway up, allowing the tower of light to seem as if it extends indefinitely into the night sky. Again, Stoller has isolated his subject dramatically from the surrounding buildings.

Photographs of two of the Seagram Building’s near neighbors on Park Avenue are also on display: Lever House (1952) and the Pepsi-Cola Building (1960), both designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The pictures were shot at street level and include automobiles, a way Stoller had of establishing the era a building was put up. In both cases, the buildings still seem fresh and new, although the cars look dated.

There are four pictures from 1962 of Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK, and they remind me not so much of other examples of architectural photography as of Edward Weston’s pictures of Charis Wilson, sensuous portraits by a man in love. TWA no longer exists, and the terminal is now vacant and hemmed in by bigger buildings, but when it first opened it stood alone, and was a marvel of both design and construction. The first picture is of the front seen in bright light from the parking lot with rows of cars vectored toward the terminal. Its dramatic silhouette is enhanced by vignetting, a gradual darkening toward the frame of the picture, as if the building occupied a nimbus.

The second picture was taken later in the day; the cars are gone, the building is lit from within, but it is still preternaturally enclosed in a nimbus. The concrete shell seems as delicate as the membrane of a bat’s extended wings. In the next picture, night has overtaken the terminal, and night is the right time for romance. It is dark beyond the light cast from inside. The uninhabited building appears as a sinuous biomorphic shape, an enormous Jean Arp sculpture, the mothercraft from a “came from outer space” movie, simultaneously archaic and futuristic, an object of both nostalgia and anticipation.

The final picture of the TWA terminal is of its interior. Bright sunlight coming through the windows produces shadows that accent the complex interplay of curved staircases, archways, flying walkways, and modeled ceiling. The elements in the picture are dizzying, but Stoller, master photographer, figured out exactly where to place his camera and exactly when to trip the shutter to make it all clear.

Until July 20 (521 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-629-6778).