Helmut Jahn, 1940 - 2021

I wanted to post something to commemorate the unhappy occasion of Helmut Jahn's catching the last train out. He died while riding his bicycle in Campton Hills, Illinois, having failed to stop at an intersection and struck by traffic. Eighty-one years old, R.I.P.

I won't attempt to give you his biography, but here are a couple of tidbits I liked from some of the obits I read:

"After obtaining his undergraduate architecture degree at in Munich, Jahn moved to Chicago to study under modernist maestro Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He left without graduating, after refusing to follow the tutors’ briefs."

"Fond of Versace suits and fedora hats, Jahn drove Porsche Carreras, owned several racing yachts, and always drew with a Montblanc fountain pen. Nicknamed Flash Gordon, he appeared on the cover of GQ magazine in 1985."

Although his work in Chicago - particularly the Thompson Center, above, a government building now being re-zoned to take the cost off the beyond-broke state/city's hands - made him famous the world over, he changed his approach in the 90s to what he termed archineering, "a collaboration between an architect and engineer at an early stage of design. It was not so much about the aesthetics but about performance and how buildings are constructed and the use of the materials." Form following force rather than function, to break with the architect's usual motto. Also: he probably just grew up a little. That happens, too.

He didn't get a commission in Chicago for many years after he left in the 80s, although his offices were still here. The conference room of Murray/Jahn was in the temple dome of 33 Lower East Wacker, once called the Jeweler's Building. (It had famous-for-its-time elevators to accommodate fleets of armored cars.)

I think I heard once that when it was first built, the temple was used by the wives of prominent businessmen as a sort of cabaret, for their husbands' eyes only, either from an adjacent building or one with a view right into the dome. I have to watch the appropriate Geoffrey Baer DVD again to refamiliarize myself with all the downtown anecdotes. I may be mixing stories here - will edit if so. Anyway, he didn't design the building, but cool damn place to have a conference center. 

Longtime readers may remember some of my armchair architecture enthusiasms from days past. I never mentioned Jahn in these posts, for example, or some of my other favorite / famous Chicago architects for that matter, (Bertrand Goldberg, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, God so many others; the first few years I lived here I was constantly looking people up and jotting things down from the train to google when I got home ("that zigzag building on S. Wabash",  "that diamond-head building," "that crazy hotel off of Superior," etc.) only because I was trying to stay on-topic to the Wolfe book. But Jahn actually was one of the first ones I ever looked up, because my third job in the city was in the Citicorp Building.

Commuting to that building from my apartment was a trip. You'd get off in the Loop and walk west on Madison - always pushed along by crowd or wind with buses whizzing by inches from your face, past the endless drum-guys and panhandlers on either side of the bridge, into the building next to it where you could take the skywalk over, then up this huge escalator to the elevator bay, where you were joined by a throng of equal size from the Metra-train commuters coming into the station from the lower level (where we all used to smoke butts). It was a hell of an introduction to working in a big city downtown for this small-town guy. The building was one of Jahn's more famous designs and broke with a lot of Chicago traditions, using big bold and bent tubular steel to make a statement in a neighborhood of right angles. 

I worked at a very shady law firm that had two of the higher floors, so views from each side of the building, each cardinal direction. Fantastic.

One of my more vivid memories is working late one December eve 2004 during some kind of crazy snowstorm with Beethoven's 7th symphony (you know the part) playing very loud in my discman (yep, still had a discman in 04) as I slowly pushed the file-cart around each edge of the building, visibility poor but very impressive. I have a ton of memories like that from working in that building. 

Now it's called Accenture Tower and look at its wiki: they barely mention anything about it except that a shooting happened there once. Pathetic. It's Chicago - a shooting has happened everywhere. What a dumb thing to occupy one third of a write-up of any building designed by Helmut Jahn.

I left that job and got one at 203 N. LaSalle, which is not a building designed by Jahn, but the one right next door to it is: the aforementioned Thompson Center.

I ate there everyday, pretty much, for lunch. I'd take the escalator, underground-walkway over there, get in line at Taco Bell, and sit with friends under the big oval near the big plants. A pedestrian use of the property, to be sure. Later, though, I started exploring around a little more upstairs and taking pictures, usually accompanied by Dawn, snapping pictures.

I always had the Black Hole swirling theme in my head in this place.

The atrium was arguably improved with Jahn's subsequent design for the SonyCenter in Berlin.

Lately, on weekend excursions just-north of town, the kids have been taken by his work on the Shure building, which is indeed quite impressive - you can see this from miles off.

Well, enough of that. R.I.P., Jahn and condolences to the family. Here's some other selected works, starting with the O'Hare United Terminal.

Metrowest Naperville

Monsueto Library, University of Chicago

Dorm, Illinois Institute of Technology

Cityspire Manhattan

Charlemagne Center, pre-and-post-restoration

One South Wacker Drive, Chicago

One Liberty Place, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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