Architect Helmut Jahn dies at 81

A cycling accident near his long-adopted city of Chicago has tragically ended the life of award-winning, German-born architect Helmut Jahn, once described by the American Institute of Architects as 'one of the ten most influential living American architects'.

A native of Nuremberg and a graduate of Munich's Technische Hochschule, Jahn pursued his postgraduate studies in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, later joining CF Murphy Associates, where he was to become president, in 1983, of the renamed Murphy/Jahn practice.

His first major high-rise project came in the form of the sleek, curtain-walled Xerox Center (now, 55 West Monroe) in 1980, an expression of a Miesian modernist inheritance, but one that Jahn never subscribed to fully, as witnessed in his subsequent, more overtly postmodernist, projects.

Later works include the State of Illinois Building (now, the James R. Thompson Center), the Messeturm in Frankfurt and the place-making Sony Center in post-unification Berlin's reinvented Potsdamer Platz.

Helmut Jahn's legacy was recognised in 2012 with the AIA Chicago's Lifetime Achievement Award, the same year his firm changed its name once more – this time simply to JAHN.

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