If you’re a frequent flyer, you’ve no doubt encountered Michael Hayden’s electronic mural Sky’s the Limit, although you probably know it as that neon splatter between the B and C concourses in Terminal 1 at O’Hare. Installed in 1987, Sky’s the Limit is very much an artifact of that decade—kitschy, eager to please, yet oddly compelling. I’m surprised by how many people I know love it. My fondness for it stems from personal reasons: The first time I saw it was in the year it opened, on Saturday, August 29. That was the day I turned thirty and that was the day my father died.
Helmut Jahn’s brand-new United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare Airport was received by critics as an immense triumph, the first architecturally ambitious commission in commercial aviation since Eero Saarinen’s work at JFK and Dulles a generation earlier. The soaring, light-filled barrel vaults Jahn conceived were inspired, he said, by the great train stations and kunsthalles from the turn of the century. But beneath it all (literally) lay a problem.
I can picture Jahn and his clients at ORD and Unit…
