![]() “He said, ‘Mr Jahn, where are the doors?’ I said, ‘There are no doors.’ And he said, ‘But then everybody can come in.’ So, I said, ‘You got it!’” “I remember when the chairman of Sony viewed the model,” Jahn later recalled. In Berlin a decade later, his Sony Centre evolved some of the civic ideas of his Illinois government building, conceived as an open public forum beneath a billowing fabric umbrella. In 1988, for the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he transformed the dull arrival experience with a kaleidoscopic disco tunnel, in collaboration with the Canadian neon artist Michael Hayden, creating one of the most memorable travelator experiences around. ![]() Its thick shaft is crowned with a cascade of angular chevrons in blue mirrored glass and bands of granite, looking like the bodybuilder cousin of New York’s elegant Chrysler Building. His skyscraper at One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, completed in 1987, burst through the city’s height limit with a brawny swagger. Helmut Jahn’s tunnel passageway of the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, 1988, designed in collaboration with the Canadian neon artist Michael Hayden. “Great statesmen, great emperors, great dictators always build great buildings.” “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in using a building to connote achievement and a certain commercial power,” he said. Turning away from the hardline modernism of Mies, Jahn developed a bold, bombastic form of corporate postmodernism, designing company headquarters, banks, airports and government buildings across the world that exuded the power-dressing pomp of the 1980s. He left without graduating, after refusing to follow the tutors’ briefs, and joined forces with Charles F Murphy in 1967, taking sole control of the practice in 1981, when the firm was renamed Murphy/Jahn (rebranded JAHN in 2012). He obtained his undergraduate architecture degree at the Technical University of Munich, before moving to Chicago in 1966 to study under the modernist maestro Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It is fair to say that if Jahn were still around, he would be eager to be front of the queue to design it: learning of the site’s possible fate in 2017, he proposed a 110-storey super-tower to sprout from the side of his conical building.īorn near Nuremberg, Helmut was the son of Lena (nee Werth) and Wilhelm, a teacher. He took the view that form should follow force, rather than function. A recent zoning ordinance would pave the way for the site to allow one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. Last week it was put up for sale, damned as a drain on state finances. The soaring conical atrium remains an exhilarating space to encounter, lined with lifts, staircases and a cat’s cradle of colourful steel bracing, looking like the Pompidou Centre turned inside out.ĭespite a growing appreciation among a younger generation reappraising this maligned period of postmodernism, the building is facing the threat of demolition. Conceived as a self-contained world, where you could grab a coffee, buy a suit, visit an art gallery, renew your driver’s licence, attend a concert and catch a train home – without ever going outside – it has served as a lively, one-stop civic mall. Plagued by practical problems – including an ice-based cooling system that notoriously failed, leading to indoor temperatures of 43C, and falling slabs of granite – it has been a costly trophy for the state to maintain.īut this brash bastion of government services has also proved to be one of the most used indoor public spaces in the city. It was described as “a chunky wedge of little grace or elegance” by the critic of the Chicago Tribune the colour palette of pink and turquoise reminded the New York Times critic of “cheap commercial buildings of the 1950s, bus stations and suburban schools”. The big-budget project drew fierce criticism when it was completed in 1985.
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