Renowned architect Helmut Jahn dies at 81 from cycling accident
Helmut Jahn, the highly respected German-American architect, was tragically killed on Saturday from a vehicular collision while riding his bicycle in his hometown of Chicago. Born in Germany, near Nuremberg, in 1940, Jahn arrived in Chicago in 1966 to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A year later, he joined architecture firm CF Murphy Associates and worked on several high-profile projects, including the McCormick Place in Chicago and the J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. He later took full ownership of the firm, renaming it Murphy/Jahn and then eventually JAHN in 2012. Jahn’s work is best defined by his postmodern steel and glass structures that combined historical and contextual references with high-tech engineering solutions, both paying homage to and departing from the modernism of Mies. It was in the late 1970s and ‘80s that Jahn made his mark, and, in Chicago, his work propelled him as one America’s most prominent ar...
Helmut Jahn, the highly respected German-American architect, was tragically killed on Saturday from a vehicular collision while riding his bicycle in his hometown of Chicago.
Born in Germany, near Nuremberg, in 1940, Jahn arrived in Chicago in 1966 to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A year later, he joined architecture firm CF Murphy Associates and worked on several high-profile projects, including the McCormick Place in Chicago and the J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. He later took full ownership of the firm, renaming it Murphy/Jahn and then eventually JAHN in 2012.
Jahn’s work is best defined by his postmodern steel and glass structures that combined historical and contextual references with high-tech engineering solutions, both paying homage to and departing from the modernism of Mies. It was in the late 1970s and ‘80s that Jahn made his mark, and, in Chicago, his work propelled him as one America’s most prominent ar...
