Helmut Jahn, FAIA Lifetime Achievement Award

Helmut Jahn. Born on January 4, 1940 in Nuremberg (Germany) and died on May 8, 2021, in Campton Hills, as a result of an accident. He was a German architect living in the United States. His childhood was spent in Núrember between the Second World War and its reconstruction. He decided to study architecture at the Technical University of Munich from where he received his degree in 1965. He then worked in an architecture office in that same city. He then emigrated to the United States where he studied for a year at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. It was at that school that he came into contact with the structural engineer Fazlur Khan who would be an influence regarding the way of working with the structure and the design of the skyscrapers that have made him known.

In 1967 Jahn joined the architectural firm C. F. Murphy Associates under Charles Murphy, where six years later he became a partner and project manager. In 1979 the studio changed its name to become Murphy / Jahn. During the 1980s the studio designed some of Chicago's best-known buildings, inspired by the works of Mies van der Rohe. Jahn was a visiting professor of architecture at the universities of Illinois, Harvard, and Yale. Between 1989 and 1993 he was a tenured professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Jahn has received numerous awards and honors. In 1991 the American Institute of Architecture named him one of the ten most influential contemporary architects. In 1994 Germany awarded him in the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2012 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the AIA in Chicago.

He passed away on May 8, 2021 at the age of eighty-one due to a traffic accident while riding a bicycle.