The architect’s death less than a week after that announcement is likely to bring far more attention to what could be lost, should the cheeky, circular building be razed, as is a distinct possibility.Īlthough then little more than fresh out of school and a junior partner recently married to Deborah Lampe (the couple would have one son, Evan), Jahn was highly influential in the 1971 design of the so-called second McCormick Place, the huge convention center next to Lake Michigan famously championed by the late publisher of this newspaper: A boring white stone building was replaced by an epic structure of black steel and glass. On May 3, the building was officially put up for sale by Gov. Thompson Center, a playfully postmodern disruption of the orderly grid system in Chicago’s Loop, controversial since its opening in 1985. He also was the designer of the state of Illinois’ huge James R. Jahn’s visual legacy in Chicago is indeed without obvious precedent. His architectural footprint will be felt & seen across the globe for generations to come.” “Jahn was one of the most inventive Chicago architects,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted Sunday, “whose impact on the city - from the skyline to the O’Hare tunnel - will never be forgotten. And, as time went on, he was regarded as less of a ‘Flash Gordon’ character and more of a modernist master.” He was renowned as much for his persona as for his architecture, but his architecture was always exceptional. “Helmut was this dashing star of an architect,” Blair Kamin, who was the Tribune’s architecture critic during most of Jahn’s most productive years, said Sunday. Great statesmen, great emperors, great dictators always build great buildings.” “I think that’s the way architecture has been used historically. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in using a building to connote achievement and a certain commercial power,” he once said. And he made no apology for his own stature, nor that of most of his clients. Charles near Chicago, would become its preeminent designer of high-profile public spaces and a full-throttle Chicago celebrity replete with the Porsche Carreras, big yachts, bespoke tailoring and all the other accessories of youthful 20th century fame. Jahn, who was 81 and died Saturday from injuries suffered in a cycling accident outside west suburban St. He didn’t formally graduate but would go on to play a central role in his home city’s singular architectural story. He put the romance back in travel, even for the humblest traveler, signaled Chicago’s cultural centrality toward of the dawn of the 21st century and created a much-copied model for new airports all over the world.īut that hardly was the only achievement of an ebullient and massively successful German American “star-chitect” who was born near Nuremberg, Germany, in 1940 and arrived in Chicago in 1966 to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Jahn replaced that grim trajectory with a sensually thrilling explosion of light, sound and excitement, designing a rhapsodic experience that emulated the great railroad hubs that once defined Chicago. Before the architect Helmut Jahn designed United Airlines Terminal 1 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in the late 1980s, travelers coming or going from one of the world’s greatest architectural cities made a quotidian trudge through a boring portal.
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