The brash architect who aimed to dazzle
Helmut Jahn 1940–2021
Whether it’s love or loathing, Helmut Jahn’s buildings always inspire a strong reaction. The German-born architect achieved rock-star status in the 1980s and ’90s with brash and playful designs that commanded eyeballs and dominated skylines. His modernist works include the neo-Deco Liberty Place skyscraper in Philadelphia—a steroid-pumped take on
New York’s elegant Chrysler Building—and the spaceship-like Sony Center in Berlin. But he left his biggest stamp on Chicago, where his numerous creations include the James R. Thompson Center, a gleaming government office complex with a conical atrium framed in turquoise glass and pink steel, and the swaggering United Airlines terminal at O’Hare Airport, with its exposed steel framework and curving, neon-lit underground tunnel. Partial to Porsches and racing yachts, the handsome architect shrugged off critics who derided his designs as ugly and impractical. “Controversy is good,” said Jahn, who died in a cycling accident. “I’d rather have people talk about buildings than say, ‘Well, that’s just another building that I didn’t see.’” He was born in Nuremberg, to a specialeducation teacher father and a homemaker mother, said The New York Times. As a boy
Jahn “aspired to be an airline pilot,” but a love of drawing ultimately attracted him to architecture. He graduated from the Technical University of Munich, then in 1966 went to Chicago to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology under the modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Refusing to follow his tutors’ briefs, he quit after a year and joined the venerable architectural firm C.F. Murphy Associates. Though fresh out of school, he played a major role in the 1971 design of Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, an “epic structure of black steel and glass” by Lake Michigan, said the Chicago Tribune. Nine years later, he “designed his first official Chicago skyscraper,” the curved, glass-and-aluminum Xerox Center. In 1981, the firm was renamed Murphy/Jahn, and eventually just Jahn.
“By the late 2000s, Jahn’s popularity had waned,” said The Guardian (U.K.). Linked to the “excesses of the previous decades,” his practice shrank to a third of its previous size. In a 2018 interview, Jahn bemoaned the “banality” that had overtaken architecture, dictated by profit-minded corporate clients. “There is no emotion, no imagination, no invention,” he said. “I prefer when form follows force rather than function.”