It should have never been built and the state should have gotten out from under this albatross a long time ago. Buildings are meant for people to live and work, not admired by urbanists and architecture hipsters. Plus the state has counted the sale of the property towards the budget for the last couple of years. The site is the most transit-friendly in the city and is begging for a supertall. My favorite Jahn building is the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, its glass-domed reading room outfitted with a working air conditioning system and the actual books tucked away in sub-basements reached by a wondrous automated retrieval system.This is unfortunate and a wasted opportunity. United Airlines Terminal One at O’Hare, including its neon-lit, Gershwin-serenaded walkway. Cold comfort to his loved ones, no doubt, and to the architects who revere him.Įven should the Thompson Center come down, Chicago will retain marvelous Jahn structures: the Xerox Center, an early work, built in 1978, the aluminum and glass curtain wall doing a friendly curve at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn. Charles, means that at least he didn’t suffer that grimmest of fate for an architect: to see his buildings torn down. So if you are the type who looks for silver linings in tragedy, Jahn’s death Saturday afternoon, at age 81, in a bicycle accident near his home in St. Pritzker announced it would take $375 million to repair and clean the building, nobody blinked at that figure, more than twice what it cost to build the place, put on the market last week. There were strips of gray duct tape holding the carpet together in the governor’s office. The state, in some strange, misguided display of penny-wise/pound-foolish economy, stopped maintaining the building years ago. Just last year, he came up with a plan to save the Thompson Center, repurposing it as a kind of enclosed urban forest. “It’s obscene,” Chicago architect Harry Weese said at the time, one of countless criticisms fired at Jahn, who never gave up on his vision. They also jammed the glass elevators, making it hard for state workers to get to their offices, one of a number of design flaws that made working there a challenge, particularly the greenhouse effect of that curved whale of glass that had sweltering state employees putting fans on their desks and cowering under umbrellas to protect them from the sun. “Modern Masterpiece or Blue Turkey?” the Wall Street Journal asked when it opened in May 1985, and of course the correct answer is “both.” The soaring 17-story lobby, inspired by the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, was a must-see for Chicago tourists who gawked at its soaring blue and salmon enclosed space. His main gift to Chicago was the much-loved, much-hated Thompson Center. Jahn didn’t hang around the office much anyway, spending half his time on the road, traveling the world, building dramatic structures in China, Thailand, Qatar, Germany, Poland. Born in Nuremberg, he had a fierce devotion to order, both a very German and very architectural quality: all of his paper clips were red, his push pins gray. “A place for each,” he told me, when I stopped by Murphy/Jahn for a visit, years ago. Its presence was a violation of his own edict not to keep “personal things” at work the reverse being true at his home, which was free from images of the stunning buildings he created around the world during his long career. Perhaps to block that view, Jahn kept in the window a model of the latest version of his sailing sloop, Flash Gordon, which won the Chicago to Mackinac Race in 1995. Wabash, a squat, trapezoidal relic that, next to the Venetian splendor of the Wrigley Building, looked like an overturned gray galvanized metal tub set beside a spun sugar ivory Victorian wedding cake. Wacker and looked out the window, you were confronted with the ugliest building in Chicago: the Sun-Times’ home at 401 N. For many years, if you stood in Helmut Jahn’s office at 35 E.
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