The American media reported that Helmut Jahn had died in a car accident. At age 81, he rode a country road bike in Campton Hills, Illinois, about 90 miles west of Chicago, where he worked for most of his life. According to Campton Hills Police Chief Steven Miller, Jahn apparently missed a stop sign and drove into an intersection. There he was swept away by two vehicles coming from other directions. The architect died on the spot, one of the participants in the accident had to seek treatment at the hospital.
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The news saddened not only Chicago, where the architect was widely known as the author of one of the most controversial buildings in the wind town. It is a building known as the James R. Thompson Center, which was completed in 1985 and served as the headquarters for government offices.
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The seventeen-story colossus, whose outer curves are all-glass, creates the illusion that the public can watch its officials in action. The open offices on each floor were to exacerbate this feeling. Stunning is the appearance of a huge layered space. Reviews at the time ranged from amazement to outrage. Many did not like the “tomato” color used on some elements of the building.
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What is certain is that Jahn did not achieve what he intended here. Due to the horrific expenditure on materials, the investing state of Illinois rejected the originally required double glass panels, which would insulate the cold in the winter and suppress the heat in the summer. One padding that turned out to be a major problem. As NBC reports in the report, the building became a money hole because of the need to purchase an expensive air conditioning system. And it still does not prevent it from being up to 32 degrees inside in summer and practically impossible to heat the space in winter. The state wants to sell the building.
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In Chicago, Helmut Jahn left several tracks behind. These include the famous colorful walkway at the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare Airport, or McCormick Place, the largest convention center in the Western Hemisphere.
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Shocking loss in the global architectural world today with the news of Helmut Jahn’s death. Here he is showing me a model of his South Campus chiller building on the University of Chicago campus in 2010. pic.twitter.com/F4UzEQEf6A
— Lee Bey (@LEEBEY) May 9, 2021
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Helmut Jahn also worked on the old continent, from which he came.
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He was born in Germany in 1940, where he studied Munich technology. From there, he traveled to Chicago in 1966, where he continued his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He established himself professionally after 1967, when he joined CF Murphy Associates, which later became the Murphy / Jahn studio.
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He was involved in the design of the J. Edgar Hoover building, the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He was behind the projects of the Sony Center and Berlin Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok or the renovation of the European Commission’s office building named after Charlemagne in Brussels.
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It is incredibly sad 2 hear that we’v lost 1 of the most virtuoso, excentric, & brilliant architects of the postmodern era, Helmut Jahn, the German who made Chicago home & became Mies’ wildly opposite archichild. This is his Park Avenue Tower, NYC, 1987, photos by @VMatteis pic.twitter.com/kstWej0GRY
— Adam Nathaniel Furman (@Furmadamadam) May 9, 2021
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“Helmut has had an exceptional career. And not only with regard to how long he created and the constant quality of his work, “the Chicago Tribune quoted the Dean of Architecture at the Institute of Technology Reed Kroloff as saying. “In his best years, he paid for one of the most influential architects in the world.” According to him, pioneering were not only the buildings themselves, but especially their technical solutions. “It’s always been very advanced,” Kroloff added.
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In his obituary, the diary recalls that Jahn taught architecture at Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and his alma mater.
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