Column: Like the painter Mark Rothko, architect Helmut Jahn was a force of nature
“Architecture is all about going with your gut,” Helmut Jahn told ArchDaily in 2018. “I prefer when form follows force rather than function.”
Jahn was, of course, using the word “force” as a way of referring to his own vision.
Like a lot of veteran artists who work long and hard in the real world, Jahn, who died last weekend in a shocking cycling accident at the age of 81, had become irritated by all the wimpy pragmatists who got in his way. He had grown tired of the people who finance buildings insisting on consulting a focus group, or dangling a fiscal spreadsheet, or worrying about maintenance, or any number of the other mundane practicalities that compromise grand visions and frustrated healthy egos. “Building now is all about profit-making; everything is so calculated,” Jahn went on, grumpily. “There is no emotion, no imagination, no invention.”
Like the artist Mark Rothko, with whom Jahn shared many characteristics, the architect was claiming that great artists make art from deep inside their soul, and they’re not ponies who can be trained to do tricks for someone else’s practical purpose.
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We don’t work to order, he was saying. Great creations must spring from something within.
Rothko never stopped expounding on that theme.
“While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned,” he once harrumphed, “everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.”
Doctors and plumbers might disagree (just get a doctor talking on the subject of hospital administrators or a plumber on developers), but Rothko and Jahn both were insisting that great art requires others to get out of the way.
The composer Stephen Sondheim certainly agreed. You can see the evidence in the musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” an entire show about the difficulties artists like Jahn often have in operating in the real world.
“Anything you do, let it come from you,” Sondheim wrote in a typically defiant lyric. “Then it will be new.”
Take, for example, Jahn’s remarkable design for Terminal 1 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. That certain came from Jahn.
In a conversation the other day, the architect Jeanne Gang (who knows a thing or two about airports herself) pointed out to me that the “force” of that Jahn design could be found in one key understanding that went against the prevailing thinking at the time: the concourse was more important than the terminal.
What Gang meant was that most airport designers had followed the lead of the great train station architects and put all their attention into the so-called “land-side” areas. But Jahn did the opposite. He focused his attention “air-side,” as any United Airlines traveler who has enjoyed all the natural light in the C gates area well knows. This was, of course, prescient thinking because, following the attacks of Sept. 11 and the subsequent changes in security, travelers started to spend almost all their airport time air-side. Airports became completely different from train stations: when flying after Sept. 11, you rushed through security as quickly as possible, lest you missed your plane, and then shopped, ate or waited on the other side.
Great departure halls of old became mere stubs.
You now can see this copied in airports everywhere: the new LaGuardia Airport in New York City is the latest example; it features a forested nod to Central Park just a few feet away from where you can board a Southwest Airlines plane.
There’s another interesting connection between Rothko and Jahn: their mutual interest in what you might call the pulse of seemingly static artworks.
The playwright and screenwriter John Logan explored this issue in great detail in his play “Red,” an exploration of Rothko as a tragedian of the visual arts. Logan’s play focused specifically on one of Rothko’s most famous commissions: the so-called Seagram Murals of 1958, huge art works designed to hang on the walls of the posh New York restaurant The Four Seasons, located inside Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Rothko both embraced the massive commission and railed against its strictures: he wanted to create art that would make the diners choke on their food, which was not exactly what the commissioners had in mind. In the end, Rothko walked away.
Such are the perils of celebrity commissions. Some years ago, the casino mogul Steve Wynn hired the Belgian spectacle director Franco Dragone to create a water-themed show called “La Reve” in Las Vegas. The show opened in the wake of the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Dragone took that as a theme and created one of the darkest and most brilliant shows in the history of the city. Wynn had in mind something to sooth his gamblers, not upset them. The owner was furious — and he quickly ordered up changes. Dragone walked away too.
Rothko famously declared himself uninterested in the relationship of color to form and other such minutiae: he wanted his paintings to express human emotions like, say, misery or ecstasy, and he was never happier then when he heard of someone crying their eyes out as they stood before his work. He didn’t want his works to be paintings of experience, he wanted them to be experiences in and of themselves. And that meant they needed to acquire a temporal quality. In the artist’s vision, Rothko’s pulsing works would change as you stood before them, taking on the kind of narrative quality we usually associate with Greek tragedies or auteur movies.
Buildings aren’t sentient creatures (arguable, I know) and don’t laugh or cry.
But If you’ve ever walked (or, in my most common scenario, ran) through the chromolume in the underground walkway in Terminal 1 at O’Hare, or even just stood in the middle of the atrium at Jahn’s threatened James R. Thompson Center in Chicago’s Loop, you’ve perhaps felt some of what Rothko was talking about.
Just as Rothko obsessed over the emotional life of his paintings, Jahn was very interested in the emotional life of buildings. This, in fact, was his great deviation from the strictures of modernism. For Jahn, form didn’t mean much if people didn’t feel a battery of different things, changing over time.
You just have to look at all the current arguments over the threatened Thompson Center to see that both Jahn and Rothko were right.
Or, as Sondheim put it: “Content dictates form. Less is more. God is in the details, all in the service of clarity, without which nothing else matters.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
