Helmut Jahn (born January 4, 1940, Nürnberg, Germany—died May 8, 2021, Campton Hills, Illinois, U.S.) was a German-born American architect known for his postmodern steel-and-glass structures.
After graduating from the Technische Hochschule in Munich in 1965, Jahn moved to Chicago to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), a school long associated with the Modernist aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers. On the basis of this solid design background, Jahn was hired by Chicago architectural firm C.F. Murphy Associates to work on the Miesian design for McCormick Place (1968–71) in Chicago. The firm was later renamed Murphy/Jahn, with Jahn becoming its president and CEO in 1983. In 2012 it became known as JAHN.
In the late 1970s and ’80s Jahn made his mark, designing extravagant buildings that combined historical and contextual references—the central tenets of postmodern architecture—with high-tech engineering solutions. The most notable, and at times controversial, example from this period is his State of Illinois Center (1985; renamed the James R. Thompson Center in 1993 to honour the former Illinois governor who commissioned the building) in Chicago. Its plan refers to the American tradition of centrally planned domed state capitols. At the same time, its dramatic blue-and-pink glass-and-steel appearance and spectacular (if noisy and difficult to climatize) central atrium makes a bold modern statement about the open nature of government. Jahn created other notable buildings in Chicago and its suburbs. These included Northwestern Atrium Center (1982; later Citigroup Center), which houses a major train station, and the steel-and-glass arched roofs of the United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare International Airport (1987). Both sheds are evocative of the grand Victorian railroad stations of the 19th century, while the exterior of the former recalls a waterfall and the latter utilizes whimsical light and sound effects. Jahn’s projects in the late 1980s and ’90s included a series of international skyscrapers, such as Two Liberty Place (1991) in Philadelphia and several international Hyatt hotels.
By the turn of the 21st century, Jahn’s buildings were beginning to sprout all over the United States and, indeed, the world. Notable examples included the Munich Airport Center (1999); the SONY Center (2000), Berlin, with its iconic central atrium; Suvarnabhumi International Airport (2005), Bangkok; and the Margot and Harold Schiff Residences (2007), student housing at IIT that recalls the railcars of the Chicago Transit Authority. In later works, Jahn moved away from historicist forms, a quality sometimes criticized in his early work, and instead adopted a more-understated vocabulary rooted in European Modernism and, more important, straightforward engineering solutions. The Mansueto Library (2011) that he designed for the University of Chicago campus gave further evidence of his melding of design and engineering. The elliptical tear-shaped glass-and-steel structure provided a light-filled reading room that disguised several stories of underground book storage and a state-of-the-art robotic book-retrieval system. Other projects from the 2010s included the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center (2015), Qatar; Cosmopolitan Tower (2013), Warsaw; and 50 West Street (2018), a residential tower in New York.
Jahn died in a bicycling accident in 2021.