In Memorium: Helmut Jahn: 1940 -2021

Helmut Jahn was killed in a bicycle/car accident on May 8 in the suburban Campton Hills, near his home and horse farm in St. Charles, IL, about 40 miles west of Chicago. He was 81. Many tributes have already been written; one from the Architectural Record offers a lot of insights, both personal and professional. You can find links to them here.

Mr. Jahn was born Jan. 4, 1940 in Zirndorf, near Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up watching the reconstruction of the city, which had been largely destroyed by Allied bombing campaigns. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich 1960-65 and moved to Chicago in 1966 to further his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  Upon completion of his Master’s Degree in Architecture in 1967 he was hired by Gene Summers at C. F. Murphy Associates. He was appointed Executive Vice President and Director of Planning and Design at the firm in 1973 and he took sole control in 1981, renaming the firm Murphy/Jahn. In 2012, he renamed the firm JAHN.

He established his reputation in 1985 with the State of Illinois Center in Chicago, later renamed the James R. Thompson Center. An iconic government office building, it is in need of massive repairs and the state officially put it on the market on May 3, only five days before Mr. Jahn’s death. Despite arguments from preservationists, it will likely be demolished to make room for a super-tall skyscraper.

The New York Times reported that, “Last year, Mr. Jahn offered a proposal to save the building by adapting it to create new offices, a hotel and apartments, and building an office tower on the southwest corner of West Randolph and North LaSalle Streets. He also proposed removing the building’s front doors and turning the enormous atrium into a covered outdoor space.

“A demolition and replacement would not only take a long time but seeks high density without considering public benefits,” he wrote in his proposal. We need not more bigger buildings, but buildings which improve the public space.”

In a bit of an overstatement, Mr. Jahn is said to have told people that the Illinois Center made his reputation in the rest of the world and killed it in Chicago.

In 1987, his design for United Airlines Terminal 1 at O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, IL opened to rave reviews. At the time Paul Gapp, the architecture critic of The Chicago Tribune, called it “one of the most aesthetically extraordinary terminals in the nation.” In The New York Times, Paul Goldberger wrote that it was “the most ambitious effort at airport architecture” since Eero Saarinen’s early-1960s designs for Dulles International Airport in Washington and the T.W.A. Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport.

Other famous projects include Sony Center on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany; Messeturm in Frankfurt, Germany; One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, PA (formerly the tallest building in Philadelphia); and Suvarnabhumi Airport, an international airport in Bangkok, Thailand.

Recent projects included 50 West Street, a residential tower in New York City in 2016 and the ThyssenKrupp Test Tower in Rottweil, Germany in 2017.

As a global “Starchitect,” he was one of the most prolific of the postmodern architects with buildings around the globe. While he found extensive acceptance in his native country of Germany, and despite his fanciful quote about the killing of his reputation in Chicago, his contribution to the outstanding architecture of Chicago is undeniable.

His highly visible public persona earned him an article in GQ magazine, in which he was humorously described as having “an edifice complex.” It seems a great complex to have for an architect to have.