Three years ago, an outcry arose when Google announced its proposed renovation of the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago. Opened in 1985 as an office building for the state of Illinois, the Thompson Center represented a rare instance of postmodern exuberance applied to public space. Its vast, round public atrium celebrated government at the very moment it began a retreat from everyday life. The supercharged color scheme (blue and reddish panels offset by smoky glass) and playful floor pattern of the sunken food court (Campidoglio chic) combined to create a spectacular urban living room, one with few equals stateside. Of course, Google was bound to junk most of it.
Helmut Jahn, the Thompson Center’s architect, who was killed in 2021 while bicycling through the Chicago suburb of Campton Hills, certainly knew how to do spectacle. Born in Germany in 1940, he moved to Chicago to study with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In 1967, he joined C. F. Murphy Associates, a major Chicago firm with extensive civic projects and over four hundred employees. A few years later, a recess…
