The German-American architect, whose high-profile projects include Terminal 1 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Liberty Place in Philadelphia, died in a road accident aged 81.
Helmut Jahn, the architect behind some of America’s best-known buildings, has died in a bicycle accident aged 81. The German-American designer, whose high-profile projects include Liberty Place in Philadelphia and Terminal 1 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, was involved in a collision with two vehicles Saturday, according to Cameron Hills Police Department in Illinois. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Born in Germany in 1940, Jahn arrived in the US in the mid-1960s to study under the modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 1967, he joined architecture firm C. F. Murphy Associates, which he would later take full ownership of, before renaming it Murphy/Jahn and then simply Jahn. Jahn’s buildings often celebrated their frames and structural elements, rather than hiding them away behind tidy facades.
