8/5/2023 0 Comments Jahn skyscraper chicago![]() ![]() Needless to say, his architectural idiom changed over time. At any rate, Jahn became famous and emerged as one of the best-known German architects, realizing projects on four continents. It was actually one of those famous American careers that would make the stuff of a movie: from rags to riches or rather as far as one can get rich in architecture. Not until 2012 was it renamed – and has henceforth operated simply as JAHN. Murphy himself increasingly withdrew from daily business but out of loyalty to his erstwhile mentor Jahn for many years left the company name unchanged. Six years after joining, he was appointed “Director of Planning and Design”, then partner and from 1983 onwards the practice as called Murphy/Jahn. Under Murphy he steadily worked his way up through the ranks. That was the scale he felt most at home with and was likewise the scale on which he liked building throughout his life. ![]() Helmut Jahn got a job in the large architectural practice of Charles Murphy in Chicago, where from the very beginning of his career he participated in large projects, court houses, libraries, sports and congress halls, office complexes, banks. In Jahn’s early work there are many echoes of van der Rohe’s extremely pared back architectural idiom, that “Classical Modernism”, clear and reduced to the essentials. He then headed for Chicago to do postgrad work at the Illinois Institute of Technology among others because of the great old Mies van der Rohe, whom Jahn got to know there shortly before the famous master architect died. Born in 1940 in Zirndorf outside Nuremberg, he studied Architecture at TH München, graduating in 1965. A steady flow of people move around on escalators and exposed elevators, enlivening the space.Jahn’s career was near picture perfect. A circular cutout in the floor, 72 feet in diameter, opens onto a large food court, a Department of Motor Vehicles office and corridors leading to nearby buildings. An enormous skylit rotunda, 160 feet in diameter and 13 stories high, is lined with balconies of open office space. The populist Postmodernism continues inside. Hearkening back to the grand domes of earlier government structures, such as the state capitol in Springfield, the southeast profile of the Thompson Center is a slice of a hollow sphere, clad in curved blue glass and salmon-colored steel. Tall, gridded walls face LaSalle and Lake streets, but on the other sides of the building, Jahn broke from the rigid straight lines of modernism. It is a unique addition to our built environment, bringing vitality and excitement to a government building and brilliantly demonstrating transparency as requested by Gov. Visitors agree, the Thompson Center looks like a stadium or a spaceship from the outside, but marvel at the view inside. Joining three other major government buildings standing within a city block of each other, the Thompson Center was to be a “peoples’ center,” an easily accessible and inviting place to do business with the state of Illinois-as well as shop and dine. ![]() They took the opportunity to consolidate 50 different state of Illinois agency offices into one new building. In the ’70s and ’80s, the North Loop Renewal Plan sought to reverse decades of decline in the area. The Clark/Lake CTA station built into the Thompson Center, serving the Blue, Green, Brown, Pink, Purple and Orange Lines, is one of the three busiest in the system. The Thompson Center is connected to the Chicago Pedway system, a network of passageways and tunnels linking many buildings and transit stations in the Loop. The building was supposed to have insulated double-pane glass, but much cheaper single-pane glass was used instead, leading to very high ongoing heating and cooling costs. At the corner of Clark and Randolph, in front of the Thompson Center, stands Jean Dubuffet’s sculpture “Monument With Standing Beast.” Did You Know ![]()
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