Although then little more than fresh out of school and a junior partner recently married to Deborah Lampe (the couple would have one son, Evan), Jahn was highly influential in the 1971 design of the so-called second McCormick Place, the huge convention center next to Lake Michigan famously championed by the late publisher of this newspaper: A boring white stone building was replaced by an epic structure of black steel and glass. By 1980, when his 800,000-square-foot Xerox Center, now called 55 West Monroe, opened at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn streets, Jahn had designed his first official Chicago skyscraper.
Helmut Jahn, Chicago’s ‘star-chitect’ to the world, was the visionary behind United’s O’Hare terminal and Thompson Center
