Word: jahn
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Exactly, says the architect, Helmut Jahn: "Technically, spatially, functionally and symbolically, this is something new." That was what Illinois Governor James R. Thompson wanted when he ordered the building in 1979 as a workplace for some 3,000 state employees. Thompson, who chose the design from three offered by Jahn, has already moved his Chicago office there, although the $172 million structure does not officially open until May. "It was a lot of money and a radical design," says Thompson. "But I felt that sometimes only government can afford to take the chance to do something really different...
...forbid, says Architect Harry Weese. "Tinselly and decadent," he growls. "The building will be an oddity, like the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood." People are choosing up sides that way all over town--at parties, in editorial columns and on the plaza outside, where the curious come to praise Jahn or to bury...
...decade: the adventurous geometry of "late modernists" such as I.M. Pei and Edward Larrabee Barnes; the office atrium pioneered by Kevin Roche; the glass- , enclosed elevators popularized by John Portman's Hyatt hotel designs; and the spirited use of color epitomized by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. The German-born Jahn, 45, an architect celebrated--some would say notorious--for his arch flourishes with high-tech elements, had applied some of the same ideas in his own earlier work, notably his 1982 First Source Center atrium in South Bend, Ind. Moreover, in such designs as his witty 1982 addition...
What is new here is the brashness with which Jahn has combined these elements and his audacity in applying them to a government building. He makes a daring and largely successful attempt to draw stark materials into a tumultuous play of form and light. The skeins of trusswork, the rippling stairways and the wafflepatterned underside of the terraces combine in an optical tangle compounded by a riot of reflecting surfaces. Without resorting to molded ornament, the atrium reaches toward a rococo extravagance. Says Jahn: "Elements that break the norm --romance, fantasy, surprise--are what put architecture beyond engineering...
Harrelson may not have seen his last of Texas courtrooms. He could be tried again for the murder in a state court, where conviction could lead to the death penalty. Said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ray Jahn, the chief prosecutor: "When Judge Wood died, justice...