The first thing
many visitors see when coming to Orlando is the futuristic vision presented by Orlando International Airport. That visual design was the creation of architect Justus L. Hellmuth, who died this week at 78.
Futuristic, airy and park-like were the visions of a Miami architect hired by Orlando four decades ago for an airport that would rise from a swamp.
“It’s like planning a small city,” Orlando International designer Justus L. Hellmuth said of concepts defying notions of an airport as a big box.
The airport would become an iconic feature of Orlando and a signature work in Hellmuth’s career, which would spanned continents. He died Tuesday. He was 78.
The airport’s birth came from a mix of soaring expectations, small-city politics and embracing Walt Disney World’s emergence.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” Hellmuth told the Orlando Sentinel in 1978 of the emerging airport.
He was a member of a family of German architects, a University of Munich graduate who pronounced his first name like the city of Eustis.
“His family did mostly very high-end houses, right down to details of doorknobs,” said Mary Soderstrom, who teamed for decades with Hellmuth in airport work. “Once he got his teeth into aviation architecture, that was his love without end.”
She said he focused on ways to move people efficiently and to “have people enjoy where they were and to know where they were.”
“He really wanted people to know they were in Florida,” Soderstrom said.
Hellmuth told the Sentinel in 1978 his airport vision embraced the region’s beautiful lakes and native plants.
As the airport planners, Hellmuth and a top airport administrator, John Wyckoff, traveled widely to study aviation design.
The Orlando International terminal would open in 1981, but they had resigned by then.
“Central Florida has lost the services of two fine public servants,” stated a Sentinel editorial in 1979.
“Neither man felt that his professional career would be enhanced by continuing,” the editorial goes on to say. “The politics have just become too heavy.”
Airport chairman W.M. Sanderlin in 1979 said Hellmuth’s “leadership has helped develop this terminal concept into one of the most innovative in the whole United States.”
“He worked on it nonstop,” said Ann Hellmuth, a former senior editor at the Sentinel who married Hellmuth in South Africa in 1965. “It’s what he lived and breathed.”
She said he often had to fight for features that initially were seen as too advanced or different: “Orlando wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today.”
But after leaving the Orlando airport, Hellmuth never looked back, as his work spanned from completting the Los Angeles airport in time for the 1984 summer Olympics, to Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and beyond.
A speaker of five languages, he retired in 2002, impassioned by international cruising.
Hellmuth would travel the world for years, with Orlando as his home base.
Along with his former wife Ann Hellmuth, he is survived by his daughter, Claudine Hellmuth of Washington, D.C., son-in-law Paul Lester, and his older sister, Marlies Traulich of Germany. Arrangements are pending.