Helmut Jahn (architect)

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James R. Thompson Center (State of Illinois Center), Chicago
Sony Center , Berlin
Frankfurt exhibition tower
Glass facade at Neuer Kranzler Eck , Berlin
Post Tower in Bonn
Highlight Towers in Munich
thyssenkrupp test tower in Rottweil

Helmut Jahn (born January 4, 1940 in Zirndorf near Nuremberg ; † May 8, 2021 in Campton Hills , Illinois ) was a German-American architect .

life and work

Helmut Jahn, son of a special school teacher in Nuremberg, grew up in the Franconian town of Zirndorf. He completed his architecture studies at the Technical University of Munich in 1965 with a diploma.

In 1966 he went to Chicago to take up postgraduate studies in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology . In his early work, Jahn tried to implement Mies van der Rohe's reduced variant of modern architecture.

In 1967 he joined the architecture firm C. F. Murphy Associates of Charles Murphy (1890–1985). When Jahn took over the management of the office in 1983, it was renamed Murphy / Jahn . At the end of the 1970s, he rejected Mies van der Rohe's strict design canon and established monumental structures as a “high-tech architect” that exude a “casual” postmodernism. Before 1983, before he took over Murphy's office, he created two masterpieces: the Kemper Arena in Kansas City as the first large, non-support hall in America and the Xerox Center in Chicago as an Art Deco skyscraper .

In 1983 he was made an honorary member of the Association of German Architects (BDA).

Jahn achieved his breakthrough in 1985 with the State of Illinois Center in Chicago. He formed a seventeen-story glass atrium out of a public administration building. Since the 1990s he discovered new topics and places, he designed high-rise buildings for Philadelphia and New York , Singapore , Warsaw , Tokyo and Rotterdam . His penchant for tall towers earned him the name "Turmvater Jahn" - based on " Turnvater Jahn ".

Jahn received international recognition for spectacular buildings such as the Frankfurt Messeturm (1985–1990), the Sony Center with railway tower at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1993–2000), the Bangkok-Suvarnabhumi Airport (1995–2005) and the Veer Towers in Las Vegas (2006-2010).

At the beginning of the millennium, he cooperated with the Stuttgart architect and engineer Werner Sobek in order to bring architecture and civil engineering together with "Archineering". After several unexecuted drafts for the Gulf States , he increasingly shifted to China from around 2005 .

From 2012 the architecture office bore his name. It had offices in Chicago, Berlin and Shanghai .

In his works he concentrated on the large scale, on high-rise buildings, airport terminals, train stations and exhibition halls. For Jahn, the streamlined aesthetics of the skyscrapers symbolized speed and progress. The tripartite division of the structures into base, shaft and crown was binding; in this way they brought dynamism and elegance into the skyline .

He had been married to an American woman since 1970 and had a son (* 1978) who was a German and American citizen. Jahn had residences in Chicago, New York and Berlin.

On May 8, 2021, Jahn died at the age of 81 as a cyclist after a collision with two cars as a result of his failure to observe a stop sign in Campton Hills near St. Charles ,  Illinois .

Buildings (selection)

(Planning and construction time according to the information from Murphy / Jahn)

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Helmut Jahn: Buildings 1975–2015 . With photographs by Rainer Viertlböck. Ed .: Nicola Borgmann. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-8296-0723-0 (232 pages, in German and English).

Web links

Commons : Helmut Jahn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Jahn turns 80 - architect of casual postmodernism. Accessed January 12, 2020 (German).
  2. ↑ Ulf Meyer: Architect turns eighty: The father of the messeturm . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed January 12, 2020]).
  3. ^ Bayerischer Rundfunk Christian Schiele: "Turmvater Jahn": An architect who likes to stack high . January 22, 2013 ( br.de [accessed January 12, 2020]).
  4. ^ Bayerischer Rundfunk Christian Schiele: With 73 in retirement: Helmut Jahn - his life . January 22, 2013 ( br.de [accessed January 12, 2020]).
  5. ↑ Interview in Nürnberger Nachrichten , November 19, 2012, p. 26.
  6. ^ Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas: Famed architect Helmut Jahn killed in bicycle accident near St. Charles. Chicago Tribune , May 9, 2021, accessed May 9, 2021 (American English).
  7. ↑ Architect Helmut Jahn dies in a bicycle accident. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 10, 2021, accessed on May 10, 2021 .
  8. ↑ Messeturm and Sony Center: Architect Helmut Jahn dies in a bicycle accident . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 11, 2021]).
  9. ↑ Murphy / Jahn .
  10. ^ BAT Frankenhöhe Süd work plan, M 1:50, September 1984.
  11. ↑ Was offered for sale in 2016 for € 7.8 million, in 2021 for € 9.5 million: online offer .
  12. ↑ Star architect Helmut Jahn: The man who scratches clouds Article from November 29, 2012 on the website nordbayern.de . Retrieved May 10, 2021.
personal data
SURNAME Jahn, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American architect
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Zirndorf near Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Campton Hills , Illinois , United States