Developer Marvin Romanek, who commissioned Jahn to do Xerox Centre, calls Jahn “a spellbinder. He’s a very shy man, despite all his bravado, and he speaks very softly, but he makes marvelous presentations. He conveys talent, logic and excitement in a very calm manner.”
Romanek recalls a project he and Jahn worked in the early 1970s. It was a proposal to pull together all of the city’s financial markets into one central building. As the concept was developing, Jahn repeatedly had to address some of the city’s most dynamic and arrogant people–bank directors, exchange presidents, commodity brokers who had just come off the combat floor–and make them want to uproot the city’s entire trading infrastructure. “He was magnificent, incredible,” says Romanek. “He had them hanging on every word. Part of it was the relish with which he approached the challenge. He would come back from a plane trip somewhere and he’d have reams of sketches for the trading center. It wasn’t a job he left at 6 p.m. It was pure joy for him.”
Says Romanek, “He didn’t just do design. He’d solve problems. We were going to have four trading floors, and at one meeting we had with Leo Melamed (chairman of the executive committee of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) I started pushing to take advantage of today’s new electronics. I thought we could create this quiet, efficient, electronic atmosphere. Leo balked. He argued that it had to be loud. He said, “Did you ever see a quiet casino? He said traders had to have the noise, the action. They needed it. In my naivete, I couldn’t see it. But Helmut did. He can size up his clients for what they are. He’s a great psychologist and he’s very flexible.”
The project ultimately failed to fly. There were too many organizations involved, too many private agendas. But out of the deal, Jahn got a commission to do the Board of Trade Annex. And he won Romanek’s heart.
“When I started putting together Xerox Centre, I hired Helmut, naturally,” Romanek says. “All I told him was, `Please don’t give me a concrete box. Give me the next generation. This is a responsible corner (Dearborn and Monroe). Let’s do something memorable.”
Two weeks later, Jahn came back with a design that was virtually the finished product, a building that swerved around the corner in a way no respectable downtown building ever had before. “He said, `Marvin, we’re turning the corner in more ways than one.’ “
“Helmut is tremendously persuasive,” says developer Harvey Walken, who hired Jahn to do his 1 S. Wacker Building. “But he’s also easy to work with. When Helmut and I were discussing the colors for my building, he wanted scarlet columns with a gray building. I said, “That’s fine if you’re trying to lease the place out to a corporation whose board chairman went to Ohio State, but I doubt if we’ll be so lucky. How about black? He said he didn’t think so, I said. `Try it, you’ll like it.’ Two weeks later it was black.
But Jahn’s salesmanship and his reputation for sensitivity to a client’s wishes are subordinate to the real reason for his stunning success: his flair for megadesign-design so flamboyant that it attracts publicity like a black coat draws dog’s hair. In the current market, with developers hungry to get their buildings noticed, that is viewed as a plus–in almost direct contrast to the premium placed on the cool sublety during the Mies era.
The outward Jahn, the glamorous, suave performer, may or may not be an act, but the core Jahn, the daring Wallenda of the drawing board, is genuine. He has an instinctive urge to make bold, even outrageous statements. It is a trend in Jahn’s work that has been gathering intensity for years, but on the occasions when it grew most outlandish, there was always someone around to save him from himself. For example, when Jahn was doing Xerox Centre, he inexplicably wanted to make it Royal Blue. Romanek was horrified.
“Helmut was starting to get this thing for colors,” recalls Romanek. “But you have to put a building in its environment. Its neighbors are the First National Bank Building and Inland Steel. How would a royal blue building look there? You can get contemporary, but only so much at a time.”
Romanek prevailed in the end, fortunately. “An outstanding architect needs a disciplined client,” he says.
But the first time Jahn didn’t have wiser counsel to hold him back, he proceeded to step way out on a limb. And this rashness, in connection with his new State of Illinois Center, has cost him–perhaps dearly.
Jahn had a vision of what the new state building should look like. It should be low-rise, massive and round, with a huge rotunda symbolizing the openness of government; but it should also be high tech to symbolize the future. So he took an enormous, hangar-sized central atrium and sheathed it in colored glass and give it a constellation of slanting, zagging exterior surfaces. If he had proposed such a building for a John Buck, Buck would have had him tested for drugs. But this client was an amateur more accustomed to line vetoes than line drawings, and more significantly, a member of that dangerous breed, an amateur with esthetic pretensions: Gov. James Thompson.
It is generally acknowledged that it is easier for an architect to slip through an unusual design when the client is a government. “Anytime the owner is a state or a city, the tendency is to let the architect play a bigger role in the planning than in a commercial project,” says a well-known developer. “It becomes a chance for the architect to get away with something he’s always wanted to do.”
Jahn’s selection as architect from among 150 candidates was made by the members of the Illinois capital development Board, who were looking for someone “who could do something world class,” according to current board executive director Gary Skoin. But there was no way that Thompson, a collector of art and antiques, was going to let anyone but himself decide what the actual design of the building should be.
As he does with all his clients, Jahn presented Thompson with several different options, including a standard 40-story tower, a square low-rise structure, and his own favorite, the round, glass-with-atrium design. There was never any contest.
“It was the building that sold me,” Thompson recalls. “Helmut gave me several choices, and although this is the one he preferred, he was a little surprised when I pick it instead of something more tame. He was expecting a less adventurous response, a safe, bureaucratic response, but he didn’t know me.”
Or perhaps he did. If Romanek is right about Jahn being a clever psychologist, he may have known how to play upon Thompson’s personality in getting him to approve a design that many consider outrageous.
Indeed, a prominent Chicagoan who was present the day the final model was unveiled at the C.F. Murphy offices says Thompson was “running around with his kid on his shoulder acting like a 2-year-old himself, asking everybody, `Didja like it, didja like it?’ We go that building cause the governor wanted a toy for $200 million.”
From that day forward, the building has been the object of intense controversy. Some people love it. Northwestern’s David Van Zanten likens it to Paris’ colorful, tubular Pompidou Museum, which revitalized a whole section of the French city. “The State of Illinois Building is our Pompidou,” contends Van Zanten. “It has turned a dreary part of town into fun. Great things have happened downtown in the last 15 years, with a lot of spectacular jazzy buildings coming on line, but it’s essential to maintain this jazzy atmosphere to keep these huge downtown investment alive. The State of Illinois Center is terribly important to the whole Loop.”
And, Thompson, of course, defends it fiercely. “I like it better every day. It’s different from every angle. If I’m on the Michigan Avenue bridge, it looks like a spaceship. If I’m inside the building, it’s a cathedral. And if I’m in front of it, it’s a giant. I even like the fact that it’s controversial. We’re a gusty city when it comes to architecture, and we shouldn’t shrink from criticism.”
But others hate it. George Danforth, a Miesian who teaches at IIT and remembers Jahn from school as “quiet and pleasant, with none of the qualities I’ve heard about since,” and who professes to be amazed that he ever got to be chief of design at C.F. Murphy, calls the State of Illinois Center “a disaster.”Says Danforth: “It is uneven in the quality of its detail, not to mention the design. The skin, the curtain wall itself, is cheap, with all those weak colors, it’s the kind of thing you’d find in a toy from Woolworth’s. It is without dignity.”
Grievous engineering problems have aggravated this situation, notably an inadequate air conditioning system. Even though those connected with the building do not blame Jahn for the engineering faults–the state chose to sue Lester B. Knight Associates, the project engineer, rather than Jahn–he has still emerged with a black eye.
One recent morning, Jahn sat behind the large black desk in his office looking uncommonly morose. The Italian-make double-breasted suit coat was carefully hung over a chair. The black fedora lay neatly on the seat. There was a bottle of Apollinaris water in one corner of the desk and his leather-bound sketch pad and colored pens were set in front of him, the sole occupants of a vast expanse of wood. The office is in his favorite colors, red and gray.
“We have been hurt,” he says quite frankly. “If one of our buildings goes wrong, tenants begin to feel there must be something wrong with all our other buildings. Our clients who are trying to rent out office space in these buildings are having trouble because of these allegations.”
Jahn won’t be specific, but he may be talking about Northwestern Atrium Center. According to reports, the building has few, if any tenants, as it nears completion.
He is asked if he has lost any commissions as a result of negative publicity. He makes a glum face. “You never know about the commissions you don’t get. But there’s a lot of talk.”
Jahn defends his building strongly. “We’ve always done what we’ve believed in,” he says. “I really was inspired by the idea of a low building with lot a of public space and the use of a glass rotunda to make government visible.
“I’m afraid the engineering problems have hurt the architectural judgment of the building. None of those problems have anything to do with the design of the building. It’s certainly not the architect’s fault. Someone didn’t do their part in making the building work right. I’m as mad about it as anyone else.”
Jahn believes much of the criticism from his fellow architects amounts to self-serving sniping. “Anything that is different or new arouses reaction in the artistic field. But this isn’t all sincere. It is professional rivalry that causes them to make some of these statements.”
Will the debacle ultimately damage Jahn? Most people don’t think so.
“It is the oldest fact about publicity that whether people like something or not, they talk about it,” says Van Zanten. “Whether London television wants to cover the opening of a Chicago building, like it did with the State of Illinois, it tells you something.”
Romanek thinks it is a temporary setback from which Jahn will bounce back. “Yeah, he’s been hurt; it’s such a high-profile situation. He’s been put in a defensive position, and anytime you have to start defending something, you’re hurt. But even though I personally don’t like the building, I don’t even think one should fault him for trying to do something unique.
“Do I think he’s been irreparably harmed? No. His talent will prevail. I will still use him. I think others will. It’s happened to other architects. There are always projects someone shouldn’t have done.
Jahn may also figure in another brewing controversy. In 1983 the FJV partnership, a consortium of local developers, won rights to what is arguably the biggest plum in the city’s North Loop redevelopment project, the block bounded by Dearborn, Washington, Randolph and State Streets. In return for a $30 million piece of land at the discount price of $12.5 million, FJV promised the city that it would save the 114-year-old McCarthy Building at Washington and Dearborn Streets.
In choosing FJV, city urban-renewal commissioners said they were snowed by the developer’s plans for the block. FJV had shrewdly hired Jahn to integrate the landmark McCarthy Building into a complex composed of a five-story shopping mall and two skyscrapers. Jahn had conceived a lovely plan, which included a smart glass atrium knifing through the mall, running all the way from Dearborn to State. At the time, Jahn boasted that his design would “combine the language of the new building with the old building.”
Recently, the city, outraged preservationists by quietly caving in to FJV, which wants to deep-six the McCarthy Building and relocate to distinctive facade to some other part of the Loop. The city did this even though, in giving the developers an $18 million gift, it presumably should have had enough clout to get its way. Jahn was silent about the affair. Whether he will continue with the project is unknown, but he is definitely on the spot. He will have to declare publicly whether his sympathies are with the glories of the past or the glories of the buck.
There may be some justice in Jahn’s dose of negative publicity, since he has thrived under the media grow light for so long. On the surface, it appears to be having some impact. Never comfortable doing one-on-one press interviews-he is one of those people whose charisma is more effective from afar than up close–he has become virtually incommunicado since the State of Illinois Center affair began. He turns down nearly all interview requests.
Does that mean he is quits with the media? Hardly. Jahn believes that in large measure starchitecture is an artifact of great press interest in architecture, and he thinks, on balance, it is a good thing.
“Architects throughout history had great visibility,” he says, “but you didn’t have the media to publicize them. I think it’s a happy marriage at this point. We’ve been accorded star status by the media, and we in turn know how to use them. It helps our profession to promote the kind of architecture which is different, unique. The media sells it, though they criticize it,too.
“`I’m not saying that I consciously use the media” he adds quickly, lest anyone think he a is a manipulator. “But it’s necessary to disseminate information.”
In the long run, controversy involving Jahn can only benefit him. He is a man who inspires strong statements. It is part of his appeal.
To Stanley Tigerman, who admires him, Jahn is modeled on grand proportions. “Helmut is heroic,” Tigerman says. “I don’t care that he happens to be making however many hundreds of thousands of dollars; he is heroic in intention. He set out to be a hero, and it is coincidental that he makes money. That’s why I admire him and he’s my friend.
“Being a hero is being courageous and being wiling to fail,” explains Tigerman. “that doesn’t mean Helmut isn’t success-oriented. He is. But it’s like he is success-oriented consciously, and heroic unconsciously.”
To Harry Weese, on the other hand, Jahn is a chameleon and a tap dancer. “He’s a creature of his clients,” says Weese. “He has a way of presenting himself. I don’t say he’s a rock star, but it gets to be a performance. He lives out the image he wants to create, the way he dresses and all. In my day, we’d all be smirking. It’s liek Oscar Wilde, whose comment was, `My fist duty is to be outrageous.’ “
A man who perhaps understands Jahn best of all is Thomas Hall Beeby, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture and himself a hot architect with the popular Chicago firm of Hammond Beeby and Babka. Beeby, who has designed the new addition to Chicago’s Art Institute, worked alongside Jahn when both were novices at C.F. Murphy and he recalls Jahn as a “brilliant, obsessive, passionate architect.
“But I think Helmut understood the aspect of marketing himself earlier than most people,” says Beeby. “I’d rank him very high as a businessman.
“The strategy has its dark side, however, the idea of promoting architects as celebrities,” Beeby says. “The problem with it is that architecture is a more substantial activity than writing rock music or designing clothes. It is concerned with the artifacts that will be left when we are all gone. Buildings are what you measure a civilization by; they are serious business. And you trivialize that by allowing yourself to become a media star. Not only that, you run the risk of being eclipsed in a short time. Architects take years to build a name and develop their art, yet in becoming fodder for the masses, you subject yourself to their short attention span. I don’t know if Helmut isn’t cutting his own throat.”
If Jahn is the epitome of the architect as marketing genius, he is certainly not the only one of his colleagues with a mastery of that skill. In fact, Philip Johnson was expanding the art of architectural self-promotion when Jahn as a mere schoolboy in Nuremberg, West Germany. A spry, round-spectacled man with a prodigious mind and a razor-sharp wit, Johnson has always said that he likes “to go against the grain.” As a newly licensed architect in the 1940s, this meant making the ultimate Modernist architectural statement: building himself an all-glass house with no interior walls and only a small centralized bathroom to provide any privacy. In later years it meant flying in the face of Modernism, which he did with a phrasemaker’s flair, dubbing Skidmore, Owings & Merrill “three blind Mies.”
A ham in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition, Johnson wows developers and corporate clients with his charisma and brilliant designs. But insiders say that Johnson’s appeal is a double-edged sword. His flamboyance makes clients nervous. Will he stay within budget? Will his bizarre concepts work? The fact is, for all the attention he has drawn in his long career, Johnson did not become a front-line architect until he joined forces with John Burgee in 1967. Besides being a first-rate designer himself, Burgee is a solid, reassuring presence. It is his done-to-earth practicality and business savvy that get clients to cinch the deal.
This marriage of the stellar architectural talent and the gifted administrator-businessman is hardly unknown in architecture. Many renowned firms of the past featured just such a combination. Perhaps the foremost current example is Kohn Pedersen Fox, where the outstanding concepts of William Pedersen and his design staff are sold to clients by the irresistible persuasiveness of partner A. Eugene Kohn. Kohn is a legendary salesman. He once talked an executive of General Re Corp., which was set to release the name of the architect for its new corporate headquarters, into giving him a chance to make an 11th-hour presentation. Kohn told the man brashly that General Re owed itself the chance to have a Kohn Pedersen Fox design. Despite the fact that KPF was only four years old at the time, Kohn crooned that it would one day be the best firm in America. He won the commission easily.
Two other architects with personal gifts for celebrity are Stanley Tigerman and Arata Isozaki. Tigerman, says Louis Masotti, is the “architect as jokester,” a man who once built a dying client a home in the shape of male genitalia in hopes it would cheer him up.
“Stanley’s genius is individuality,” says John Zuchowski, architectural director at the Art Institute. “You never know what you’re going to get with him.”
Isozaki is remarkable for how he has submerged the traditional, self-effacing aspect of the Japanese personality to play the self-aggrandizing game necessary to win Western commissions. He has learned how to play to the television cameras at press conferences and to wring the most attention from his controversial designs.
It may be that starchitecture is nothing more than a passing fad. Or it my persevere, adding architecture to the list of American institutions, among them politics and religion, that have been transformed by the influence of Madison Avenue thinking. Whatever its future course, starchitecture has brought with it two signal accomplishments. It has resulted in the realization of some truly admirable architecture over the last few years, and it has stimulated a profession notorious for its business ineptitude to acquire some of the acumen necessary for success in the 1980s (History is not without examples of great architects with a gift for clinching sales–notably Henry Hobson Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright–but such individuals have been rare). For this, future architects may be forever grateful.
Says 69-year-old Chicago architect Ogden Hanniford: “I personally find the direction in which Helmut Jahn and others are going to be uncongenial. But they are undoubtedly more sensitive to what people want than I am.
“That’s the basic problem of architects. Louis Sullivan wouldn’t give people what they wanted. He only gave them what he felt was right. In the end, he wound up with no work at all. If only he had been more flexible, he might have died a wealthy man.”
