Helmut Jahn, the highly respected German-American architect, was tragically killed on Saturday from a vehicular collision while riding his bicycle in the Chicago suburb of Campton Hills.

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 architects. In particular, his State of Illinois Center built it 1985, now known as the James R. Thompson Center, became one of his most iconic and celebrated works. Another one his most acclaimed projects is the 500,000-square-foot United Airlines Terminal 1 building at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, which includes the striking, neon-illuminated pedestrian tunnel.

Outside of Chicago, Jahn’s extensive portfolio includes One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, along with international projects, including the Sony Center in Berlin and Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. Later in his career, Jahn shifted into a more understated style with simpler, cleaner forms and straightforward engineering solutions. The Mansueto Library that he designed for the University of Chicago and the Cosmopolitan Twards in Warsaw demonstrate this transition. In 2016, he designed a residential tower called 1000M, named after its Chicago address, 1000 S. Michigan Ave., that was expected for completion in 2022 until construction stopped due to the pandemic. 

Throughout his career, the German-American architect also taught, with positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University, and the IIT. 

Jahn is survived by his wife, Deborah Jahn. 

Jahn was a “dashing star of an architect,” says Blair Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune architecture critic. “He was on the cover of GQ. He was renowned as much for his persona as for his architecture, but his architecture was always exceptional. And, as time went on, he was regarded as less of a ‘Flash Gordon’ character and more of a modernist master.”