Helmut Jahn, Chicago’s ‘star-chitect’ to the world, was the visionary behind United’s O’Hare terminal and Thompson Center

Before the architect Helmut Jahn designed United Airlines Terminal 1 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in the late 1980s, travelers coming or going from one of the world’s greatest architectural cities made a quotidian trudge through a boring portal. Jahn replaced that grim trajectory with a sensually thrilling explosion of light, sound and excitement, designing a rhapsodic experience that emulated the great railroad hubs that once defined Chicago. He put the romance back in travel, even for the humblest traveler, signaled Chicago’s cultural centrality toward of the dawn of the 21st century and created a much-copied model for new airports all over the world.

But that hardly was the only achievement of an ebullient and massively successful German-American “star-chitect” who was born near Nuremberg, Germany, in 1940 and arrived in Chicago in 1966 to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He didn’t formally graduate but would go on to play a central role in his home city’s singular architectural story.

Jahn, who was 81 and died Saturday from injuries sustained in a cycling accident outside west suburban St. Charles, would become its pre-eminent designer of high-profile public spaces and a full-throttle Chicago celebrity replete with the Porsche Carrerras, big yachts, bespoke tailoring and all the other accessories of youthful 20th century fame.

He made no small plans. And he made no apology for his own stature, nor that of most of his clients.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in using a building to connote achievement and a certain commercial power,” he once said. “I think that’s the way architecture has been used historically. Great statesmen, great emperors, great dictators always build great buildings.”

“Helmut was this dashing star of an architect,” said Blair Kamin, who was the Tribune’s architecture critic during most of Jahn’s most productive years, on Sunday. “He was on the cover of GQ. He was renowned as much for his persona as for his architecture, but his architecture was always exceptional. And, as time went on, he was regarded as less of a ‘Flash Gordon’ character and more of a modernist master.”

“Jahn was one of the most inventive Chicago architects,” Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot tweeted Sunday, “whose impact on the city — from the skyline to the O’Hare tunnel — will never be forgotten. His architectural footprint will be felt & seen across the globe for generations to come.”

Jahn’s visual legacy in Chicago is indeed without obvious precedent.

He also was the designer of the State of Illinois’ huge James R. Thompson Center, a playfully postmodern disruption of the orderly grid system in Chicago’s Loop, controversial since its opening in 1985. On May 3, the building was officially put up for sale by Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The architect’s death less than a week after that announcement is likely to bring far more attention to what could be lost, should the cheeky, circular building be razed, as is a distinct possibility.

Although then little more than fresh out of school and a junior partner recently married to Deborah Lampe (the couple would have one son, Evan), Jahn was highly influential in the 1971 design of the so-called “second” McCormick Place, the huge convention center next to Lake Michigan famously championed by the late publisher of this newspaper: A boring white stone building was replaced by an epic structure of black steel and glass. By 1980, when his 800,000-square-foot Xerox Center, now called 55 West Monroe, opened at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn Streets, Jahn had designed his first official Chicago skyscraper.

Brash and fearless, Jahn was part of the so-called Chicago Seven, a contentious group of architects who rebelled in the 1970s against what they they saw as the reductionist modernist narrative, popular in the media’s chronicling of Chicago architecture.

But in the years that followed, as his fedoras and gangster suits left his wardrobe in favor of more sober attire, Jahn became known more for combining the famed modernism of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe school with a palpable respect for historical referents, emotional vocabulary and other such deviations from orthodoxy.

“Helmut didn’t so much rebel against modernism but the strictures of late 20th century modernism, which he found indefensible,” said Reed Kroloff, dean of the College of Architecture at IIT, on Sunday. “He wasn’t afraid of history and he didn’t think it should be disregarded. And he was very comfortable trying to strike emotional chords in the viewers and users of his buildings. You can see it all over the place.”

In Chicago and the world, Jahn’s new places kept rising. There were towers in China and signature creations in Philadelphia, pushing that city’s tolerance for height.

At home in 1983, the 23-story addition the Chicago Board of Trade arose; the building was a bold statement but yet it offered an explicit reflection of the CBOT’s famed original home in its glass facade. His Northwestern Terminal Tower design (1987) offered similar nods to Chicago’s art deco histories while striking its own tone. Even the Thompson Center, widely derided for looking more like a shopping mall than a governmental building, had subtle nods to the more traditional structures housing bureaucrats, not least in its classic columns. Those just didn’t get a lot of attention.

In the late 1980s, Jahn designed the Messeturm in Frankfurt, Germany, then the tallest building in Europe. In 1982, he opened the 41-story Post Tower in Bonn. And in 2002, Berliners finally got Jahn’s famed Sony Center, a colossal public building designed to unify over the rubble of the crumbled Berlin Wall and a creation renowned for its emotional impact.

In 2003, in a meaningful personal project along Chicago’s State Street, Jahn designed a dormitory for IIT, his alma mater and a school whose home had been designed by van der Rohe.

“At his best,” Kamin said, “Jahn extended Chicago’s legacy of marrying technological innovation and architectural artistry into the late 20th and early 21st century. Helmut was not a theoretician like Stanley Tigerman. He had a far more concrete impact on the city.”

And in 2011, the University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, a fascinating structure with a glass dome and myriad subterranean mysteries, was completed. The library is known for speeding up “scholarly productivity” by allowing for the retrieval of materials “within an average time of three minutes” through the use of robotic cranes, a furthering of Jahn’s long-standing interest in such technology, aesthetically and otherwise.

“Helmut had an exceptional career both for its length and for the consistent quality of the work,” Kroloff said. “At his height, he was one of the most influential architects in the world. Not only formally, but technically. He engaged early on with building-skin technologies that were very advanced. He created buildings of every variety.”

In 1967, Jahn joined the architecture firm that bore the name of Charles F. Murphy. Murphy, who had begun his career working under Daniel Burnham and whose firm was the lead architect of the Prudential Center in 1955, died in 1985 at the age of 95. But it was not until 2012 that what had become Murphy/Jahn in 1981 became just Jahn.

By then Jahn already had begun plans to eventually hand the reigns, and the custody of his legacy, to his longtime protege, Francisco Gonzalez-Pulido.

Still, the largest Chicago skyscraper to have construction halted by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21 was, the Tribune has reported, 1000M, a new building located at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. 1000M was planned as condos but most likely now has a future as an apartment building.

Tenants will live in spaces designed by Helmut Jahn.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com