The design work of Helmut Jahn has always engaged technology at the center of architectural activity. His flamboyant personality is duplicated in his later architectural design works, which have shifted from a late-Miesian vocabulary to a Postmodern phase characterized by high-tech stylizations. His rapid climb within C.F. Murphy and Associates (founded 1937) put him in an influential position to redefine the established firm's exclusive position in Chicago into a firm of international significance. The most recent work incorporates the transparency of glass, futuristic systems, and advanced ecological concerns that can be traced to the technological imperative of his earliest works and education.

After Jahn studied in Munich and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), his work privileged the expression of the mechanics of construction within the formalist idiom. Working with Gene Summers, his first design work included the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago (1970), a project influenced by the detailing and structured space of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie (1965-68) in Berlin and his unbuilt project for a convention hall (1953) in Chicago. Situated between Lake Michigan and Lake Shore Drive, the gridded interior space is defined by a large-scale space frame overhead, spanning the open plan of 150 feet with additional 75-foot cantilevers projecting over the exterior space. In 1973, Jahn designed the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri.

This project utilized three steel trusses to hang a roof over a large oval-shaped athletic arena space and seating for 18,000 spectators. Suspended over a solid exterior cladding of insulated metal panels and rounded corners, the project expresses a faith in space-age technology. After this, he directed the design of many large urban projects, including courthouses, libraries, convention centers, and corporate office towers across the midwestern United States, experimenting with this emergent style. The works of the period 1974-78 exhibited a growing confidence in the expressive use of primary colors and exposed technological devices, in sympathy with the Archigram group in England. Jahn was a member of the informal group of nascent voices who called themselves the Chicago 7 since 1977. During this period, he began to participate in a larger discourse on the direction of architecture informed by the communicative and symbolic functions of architecture. The work of Murphy/Jahn turned from a strict interpretation of the technologically driven design of the Miesian tradition and aligned itself with a rising trend defined by critic Charles Jencks as Postmodernism. Jahn acknowledged this perceptible shift in his work's meaning as a new attitude allowing the firm to "free our skills to practice architecture beyond a mere problem-solving, functionalist methodology, resulting in a pluralism, which is multi-directional, less restrictive and less dogmatic, characterized by a loss of conviction as to exclusivist principles and more communicative and user-oriented." This new emphasis on populism and pluralism informed his subsequent urban projects as a directed search for a "variable, wide-ranging architectural language." The towers proposed for the Xerox Center (Chicago, designed 1977, built 1980), the Chicago Board of Trade Addition (designed 1978, built 1982), the unbuilt Chicago Tribune Tower Late Entry Competition (1979), the Northwestern Terminal (Chicago, designed 1979, completed 1986), and One South Wacker (Chicago, designed 1979, built 1981-82), utilized exterior curtain walls of glass, reflective and selectively colored for ornamentation distinctly different than the exhausted Miesian prototype of somber discipline. The lobbies of these tall buildings express this concern with populism and ornamentation in their simplified echoes of Art Deco and art moderne precedents. Physically and structurally dependent on earlier technology, these projects participated in a larger cultural shift toward forms that recall the past and break overall volume into subordinate masses. The influence of the early pioneering phase of tall-building design is recalled in a distinctly reductivist execution, achieving the Postmodern goal of reconciling modernism to its historical past. It is during this time that the preliminary design sketches and representations of projects become self-conscious tools in the development of style, where the explorations of "paper architecture" appear transferred to the skins of the buildings.

This process is evident in the project submitted for the competition for a tall building in Houston—the Bank of the Southwest Tower (1982). Here, the submitted drawings and design-process sketches for an 82-story building reveal a search for an appropriate style for the tall building in a city with much fewer built precedents as context. The multiple studies range across high-tech mechanical volumes to historically reminiscent stacked and tiered forms following the base-shaft-top typology of the early 20th century. The resulting submission utilizes masonry cladding at the ground level, a clear prismatic solid shaft (with Jahn's frequent use of multicolored glass-curtain walls as decoration), and a schematic top that mimics the Chrysler Building (1930) in New York.

The most prominent commission of this period was for the State of Illinois Center, later renamed the James R. Thompson Center. Designed in 1979, it was finally constructed in May 1995. The program for the square site adjacent to City Hall included over a million square feet of office and administrative spaces for various branches of the State of Illinois government, stations for subway and elevated trains, and retail at the plaza level. The building's form has a large cylindrical rotunda 160 feet across rising all 17 floors to an inclined glass roof. It is an internalized public space, animated by the flow of people and sounds than the mannered exterior space. The vertical circulation of elevators, escalators, and stairs move up through this futuristic space that performs a valuable energy-conserving function. The overall building form is a quarter circle in plan, with three faces built to the street lines, but the curved face that faces the exterior plaza is inclined with three setbacks. The ground level contains exterior cladding of pink and gray granite forming a continuous arcade. The red, white, and blue glazing and metal panels are a glib reference to its government function and employ details from Jahn's other tall buildings in Chicago. The Thompson Center has received near-constant public criticism for its expense, execution, and appearance.

Contemporaneous with these projects for tall buildings, a significant series of commissions for the growing O'Hare International Airport allowed Jahn to explore his vocabulary in a radically different building type. Projects at O'Hare included the Rapid Transit Station (designed 1979, built 1983) and the award-winning United Airlines Terminal and Satellite Building (built 1985-87) arising from the successful proposal for the overall development of O'Hare in 1982. The airport's growth continues, and Murphy/Jahn remains the primary architect of one of the world's largest airports. Accommodating over 40 new gates and over a million square feet of circulation and supporting facilities, this project was designed as two parallel linear systems composed of a repetitive series of steel structural bays. The structural system is expressed in curved-steel arches and cross bracing that incorporate mechanical modernist strategies from Victorian influences. The successes of the project are its legibility, clarity, and ease of movement through the vaulted space. Folded trusses and four-post structural columns create human-scaled modules of space in a vast project. Subterranean connections are designed as moving walkways surrounded by kinetic light and sound sculptures, an overt populist treatment of a potentially gloomy space. In 1985 three projects were designed for New York City: the unbuilt tower for the New York City Coliseum at Columbus Circle, the unbuilt Times Square redevelopment project, and the City Spire Project (built 1985-89). The recession of the late 1980s put an end to most large construction in Chicago and other large American cities, and the office of Murphy/Jahn responded by pursuing more international work. Projects and competitions for Jahn's native Germany and works in Asia formed the basis of the late phase of 20th-century design work for the firm. Two variations of the United Airlines Terminal were proposed for the Consolidated Terminal for American Airlines and Northwest Airlines (1988) at JFK International Airport in New York. A vast Second Bangkok International Airport (designed 1995) was stopped because of public criticism over cost and the absence of "Thai elements" in the design.

Jahn's Messeturm (1988-91) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was one of Europe's tallest buildings, towering over the sprawling city. Its design follows the logic of the earlier tall buildings, with a historically informed silhouette. An adjoining market hall for the Frankfurt fairgrounds (one of ten designed by multiple architects) formally anticipates the later unsuccessful Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Design Competition (1997) for a new student center at the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Across State Street from Mies' S.R. Crown Hall, Jahn designed State Street Village (2003), a set of residence halls that face off with the Miesian legacy. These forms span large blocks of programmatic space with a gracefully curved but monolithic metal roof, a softening of the orthodoxy of the earliest works.

The most prominent and anticipated work of Murphy/Jahn in the 1990s was the vast Sony Center (1995-2000) in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. This project, like many others, was initiated on the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a deliberate attempt by the federal government of Germany to rebuild a totalizing urban fabric across the barren areas created by the Cold War division of the city. Potsdamer Platz received special attention, as its prewar status as a vibrant urban center gave way in the 1950s and 1960s to a vague territory of emptiness in the middle of the city, desolate in comparison to the adjoining Tiergarten. The overall master plan for the sites was won previously in a competition by architect Renzo Piano, who was responsible for overseeing all the new construction. Contemporaneous design projects near Potsdamer Platz were done by established international architects, including Rafael Moneo, Richard Meier, and Daniel Libeskind.

Within the Sony complex, the ruins of the Grand-Hotel Esplanade (1908-12, Otto Rehnig) were incorporated with some difficulty: the "Emperor's Hall," weighing 1300 tons, was raised 2.5 meters and transported 75 meters on rails to its final location within the ensemble. The large office tower for Sony, executed in a neomodern technique of technology, signifies the movement away from the flagrant populism of earlier work and is remarkably restrained and serious, in contrast with Jahn's slender office tower on Ku'damm. The concrete-frame construction of the diverse program is clad in smooth glass skins to emphasize the transparency of the volumes and the public space between them.

Major elements of the project pursue the historical function of the site and the technology of the client as a public overture—although now as useful themed functional space, not as privatized icons. The Sony Center entertainment facilities include an eight-screen multiplex cinema and an IMAX three-dimensional theater. In accordance with the cinematic programming, the Berlin Filmmuseum and the German Mediathek are joined with an education facility, the Film and Television Academy Berlin, the Filmlibrary, the Film Distribution House, and the programs of the German Kinemathek. Restaurants and shops at ground level, below-grade parking facilities, and a significant amount of housing above ring the difficult triangular site. The project follows the Berlin model of perimeter block housing defining large interior public spaces (here gardens and a formal paved plaza). The most visible component of this mixed-use urban block is the elliptical tensile construction echoing the tent forms of a pre-cinematic form of popular entertainment: the circus.

The Hotel Kempinski (1993-94), near Munich Airport, places the hotel space alongside a vast atrium with a thin overhead canopy and an all-glass entry facade designed to deflect up to one meter with changing climatic conditions. The increasing reliance on glass skins and exposed mechanical systems overtakes the earlier strategies without stepping entirely away from the earliest formalism. Transparency is not pursued as an allegory of a transparent or democratic society but as a citation of the earliest experiments in the potential of glass as a signifier of modernism, as in the unbuilt office towers proposed by Mies in the 1920s or the socialist expressionism of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut. The literal transparency of glass in his last 20th-century work shows a fusion of history and technology. As Werner Blaser has stated, “Helmut Jahn has given the use of steel and glass in architecture an exceptional technical and aesthetic articulation that is inseparably associated with the concept of transparency. Standing squarely in the tradition of the 19th century and yet interested in the continued development of innovative facade technologies, Jahn places the supporting steel structure of his buildings on the outside. At the same time, he wraps his glass skins around a light and weightless interior that acquires a special force through effects of light and color.” (See Blaser, 1996) A reliance on sophisticated technology, “high-tech” signature pieces, “passive/active systems,” technical innovation, and an emphasis on the image of technology are all manifest in the later works, although they are implied in the imagery of the earliest.

Thomas Mical 

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.