ludic capitalism
helmut jahn and the childhood postmodern imaginary
Last week, I took my first formal (no emails) vacation in a very long time. It was a “staycation,” if you will, spent doing touristy stuff around Chicago with a very good friend of mine who came to visit me from Europe. Because I am me, and because we were in Chicago, a great deal of our time was devoted, whether intentional or not, to architectural perusal. Anyone who’s ever been to Chicago knows that it will never let you forget for a single second that it (not New York) is the birthplace of both architectural modernism and the skyscraper. This architectural self-mythology is reiterated in every guide and map, as well as in myriad gift stores where one can buy cheap little models of Skidmore Owings and Merrill’s Willis (née Sears) and John Hancock Towers. (And that’s before we get into the Frank Lloyd Wright industrial complex.)
Yet if I think about the Chicagoland buildings that captivate me most on a personal, sensual level – the ones I collect in my memory like stones along a river – they are not, embarrassingly enough, the hits. Hence, if you were there last Wednesday, you would’ve found me on the observation deck of the Willis Tower excitedly pointing out not Louis Sullivan or Mies van der Rohe or Daniel Burnham but every middling corporate office building from 1975 to circa 2000. And trust me, when I say corporate I mean corporate. Think oil-canned reflective curtain walls stitched together by flat mullions. Think 1990s Kohn Peterson Fox neo-Art Deco bankcore. Think anonymous beige towers in different flavors of pediment and obelisk. Think Postmodernism after it had already kinda given up on itself. Yeehaw.
You may be asking how an avowed socialist such as myself could have developed such deep, aesthetic devotion to corporate office buildings, to which I would say: it just sort of happened that way. It’s neither unusual nor hard to explain. For me and millions of other children, the foundation of my architectural memory and comprehension just so happened to coincide with an era in which architecture was extraordinarily easy for children to grasp.
Much has been said about the politics of Postmodernism and how it fundamentally altered architecture. (There’s no need here to rehash the Ancients versus the Postmoderns again.) Of its specific elements, its pastiche, its ornamental revivals, its irony, its reconciliation of old symbology with new materials, etc., the most chided, even at the time, was its childishness. This ire was mostly unleashed upon the concept of theming or its most complete expression – the theme park itself.1 (Indeed, it wasn’t a minor opinion that the theme park was the end logic of Postmodernism.)
The criticism is somewhat understandable. By the end of the 80s, the sign had not only won, it dominated. The proverbial sheds weren’t just decorated, they had become their own ticky-tacky movie sets. Rainforest Café! McDonald’s Playplaces! TGI Friday’s! ESPIRIT! Broadway at the Beach (if you’re from the South)! Design and production majors had never been so employed and will never again be so employed. Every bit of architectural ornament, every mall, every restaurant, every McMansion basement, every place of business, entertainment and consumption, employed a design language that was in some way exaggerated and self-referential. Nothing was real. Everything was an image.
It’s not enough to say that Postmodern architecture was just the cynical, animated winged Hermes of corporate schlock during the neoliberal turn. By forging an aesthetic link between capital, childhood, fantasy, and play, it envisioned and executed a specifically ludic capitalism. In doing so, it both infantilized adults and set high expectations for just how fun the world would be for children.
To return to office towers, I know as an adult that banking is a majority-evil industry, that corporations are all doing their best to rob us of the fruits of our labor and send us to our untimely deaths in the climate wars. But a very long time ago I was a child being communicated to through architectural images. These images were very effective. Postmodernism accumulates and regurgitates, often in distorted form, signs. In its kitschiest iterations (think department store displays) it remembers obsessively, in congealed piecemeal, as though afraid of forgetting. Architecturally, in contradiction to its accumulation, it also simplifies. It dumbs down referents – including whole buildings – into easily understandable shapes. Column, obelisk, archway, turret, parapet, cupola. It gave us Kidz Bop versions of the Parthenon, the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument.
Whether these signs and symbols were to be utilized in a theme park, skyscraper, strip mall, bank, or school was becoming increasingly irrelevant by the 1990s when the semiotic turn in architecture had become more parti than theory. This formal abstraction and the detachment of architectural signs from their long-held indexical meanings often resulted in a rather confusing mix of form and function. (Why, for example, is Michael Graves’ building for the Humana Insurance Company formally communicating that there might be candy inside? But also a prison?)
This deterioration only continued as the movement fanned out beyond its proselytizers. While much attention has been paid to the true believers like Venturi and Scott Brown (and their theoretical lessers), a lot of architects weren’t so deep in the trenches of passion. What wasn’t being built in Seaside, Florida was being built everywhere else, including in a major large-scale office building boom that swept America’s cities and large suburbs. This, too, is unsurprising. When the neoliberal postindustrial economy was actualized, corporate structures changed as a result of industrial production being outsourced overseas. To accommodate this, new kinds of jobs racked up in banking, finance, technology, communications and management. The need to house all those new financiers, call center workers, and managers meant that many skylines were gifted new silhouettes.2
The speculative office building boom came as a godsend to an architecture decimated by the oil crisis, and was the stamp with which many firms made their mark in the late 70s and early 80s. In Chicago, the firm that did this most effectively was that of Helmut Jahn (b.1940, d.2021). I wasn’t thinking about Helmut Jahn when I first set out to write about Late-PoMo corporate towers, but he became my subject simply because the building initially responsible for this wave of reflective nostalgia wasn’t on the Chicago skyline at all. It was Jahn’s Oakbrook Terrace Tower (1986) in Oakbrook, Illinois. As viewed from a car, of course.
This 31-story tower, with its mirrored glass and faceted quadruple-gabled form, is the platonic ideal of a kind of building that exploded in the mid-sized downtowns, edge cities, and weird corporate headquarter zones of primordial Millennial childhood, an as-seen-from-the-highway type that sparked countless transient imaginations. Or at least mine. (This imagination was perhaps intensified by the fact that I only got to go to the city once per year to buy new school clothes and hence developed a scarcity mindset about looking at tall buildings that made many seem more sacred than they were.)
There are two ways of thinking about a so-called ludic capitalism as it pertains to architecture. The first, obviously, is the way in which corporations use architecture, design, and thematic scene-setting to invoke play as a marketing tool or as a desirable, heightened experience for the consumer (often at a premium.) In response, there is also an inverse: the way people, especially children, interpret architecture in ways that project a certain playfulness onto it, one that may soften or totally obscure a building’s use or the systemic, material realities that brought it into being.
A child does not know about Postmodern architecture or about finance capital or even about irony and only reads things as they seem. If I think about my own upbringing, architecture was defined by boundaries that were either stiff or porous, the most porous being the vernacular. Historical architecture was field-trip formal, a museum piece, untouchable. In our lush, WPA-era Colonial Revival post office one had to be quiet in a way that was not true of the aluminum-paneled UPS store. Modernism, so thoroughly adopted by institutions, governments, and stolid businesses, had a distinct language of adult authority. As a child, the Brutalist county courthouse was the most forbidden, grown-up only space imaginable. Even now, as I cut through the strip between Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center and its adjacent post office on a weekly basis, I still think of these as grown up buildings for serious people with checkbooks. It goes without saying that the cult of Mies only adds to this sentiment.
But Oakbrook Terrace Tower is contradictory. The building’s singular monumentality and its proximity to the mall (a space of leisure) create a strong, initial attraction. Its lack of balconies, window treatments or branding exclude the possibilities of occupancy by residences or hospitality. Mirrored glass invites looking in, but its opacity adds both mystery and a sense of transgression (i.e. it can only be seen through at night while perplexingly illuminated, when no one is working.) The tower’s formality, in part owing to the big business language of the grid, tells us it is a place, arguably, for adults. Yet it is dressed in the language of children. It is not beige and brown but purple and teal. It is not flat-topped but gabled, much like the gables of home. Its shimmery, faceted shape and the simplicity of its massing gives it the appearance of a toy, or perhaps a crystal. (The Prairie Style gestures of the chevrons and mullions on the front elevation are not lost on the adult architecture critic.)
Through these aesthetic mechanisms, Oakbrook’s architecture sparks allure in a demographic it was not designed for. It gives the corporate building, and to an extent, the corporate world, a sheen of fun. It invites and seduces when other buildings obscure and reject. One thinks: something interesting must be going on in there, something I will someday be able to partake in. An adult can see the irony in all this. It’s borderline insipid to make a building whose main tenant is the Bosch company seem so fucking precious and jolly. A more critical eye finds invoking the language of the domicile in the structure of the workplace insidious.
Jahn is a good architect to examine in terms of intentionality because unlike the more obvious sugar-coated examples one can pick here such as Graves or Stern (who were less corporate architects anyway unless that corporation was Disney) such formal gestures were really a means to an end for him. Jahn also has the reputation of being an especially complicated architect of complicated buildings when, with the exception of the magisterial Thompson Center (now tragically lost) and its Y2K cousin, the Sony Center, this is, in my opinion, untrue.
To me, Jahn’s buildings are simple – simple to the point of being understood by children. The use of mature Late Modernist, clearly readable, exposed structure and simple Postmodern formal gestures are synthesized in a unique, playful, exploratory way. Not to be all psychoanalytical about it, but the buildings do not talk down to in the way of, say, Graves, but establish, via use, scale, and aesthetics, a continuity between childlike curiosity and the promise of adult practicality. In addition, Jahn’s signature flourish, the vast atrium, makes a child of us through sheer scale whether we want to take a psychoanalytic turn or not.
In the 1970s, an early-career Jahn devoted himself to small exhibition halls, libraries, and gymnasiums. Some of these, like the Fourth District Courts Building (1976) in Maywood, IL, are basically Mies boxes on stilts, except the rectangle of the rectangular grid is rotated 90 degrees for clear, horizontal movement. (Jahn went to IIT for a year thanks to a scholarship from the Rotary Club.) Other early projects, such as the plasticky, technicolor De La Garza Career Center in East Chicago, IN (1975-81), are clearly indebted to the work of Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, James Stirling and the British High Tech movement as a whole.3 By this point, Jahn had begun reconciling the grid within a new form of technical expressionism.
It is in his gymnasia, specifically the St. Mary’s Athletic Facility in Notre Dame, IN, where we see the first emergence of Jahn’s most consistent motifs: exaggerated circulation, vast, space-frame-articulated bays and halls, and the use of color, particularly primary colors, on structure. For all its avowed complexity, the form of High Tech architecture explains, with explicit, exposed, color-coded parts, how it comes together. It is Erector Set architecture. Jungle gym architecture. It is toy architecture. It is this he would expertly merge with the new trend toward historicism and signification. Already legible, his buildings would only become more so as they became, in a word, images.
In Jahn’s 1980s and 90s work, the Miesian grid (which he permanently loved) was a visually consistent system that added formal logic and regularity to a then-emerging catalog of oversized shapes, signs and symbols. He did this to somewhat odd, even humorous, effect. For example, three of his Chicago buildings, the Board of Trade addition, One South Wacker (both completed in 1982) and Northwestern Terminal (1986), are essentially an exercise in 3D pixel art. Different shades of mirrored glass are employed via the grid to make simplified renditions, images, of a building. The Board of Trade itself is literally a pixelated version of the original 1920s building it is attached to.
Looking at all of Jahn’s projects side by side in the 1986 Rizzoli monograph4 of his early work makes one realize exactly how iterative he was. He often sent in not one but up to six entries to individual competitions. When those entries were rejected, he recycled them. His was a circular economy of coming up with shapes for buildings. There’s not a single project that isn’t indebted to the scraps of another. Northwestern Terminal (now the Accenture Tower), for example, is literally a rejected proposal for the Board of Trade building, and its form comes from the curved, art deco corbels of the original Board interior lobby. It also looks, ironically enough, like an old-timey cash register.
I mentioned earlier that Jahn wasn’t a true PoMo believer. (Otherwise he would’ve given up the grid.) As Nory Miller notes in the introduction to the monograph, Jahn’s architectural form wasn’t so much about communicating symbolism or invoking specific architectural history, but rather about creating “recognizable images.” These images themselves were “a method of making choices – choices of color or shape or pattern – from among the endless possibilities.”
Jahn himself is quoted in the text as saying: “You have to accept the fact that when people hire you to do new and different things, you can’t go around defending one kind of thing and develop a philosophy around it. If I had a philosophy, all the buildings would be the same. The only way to succeed in this area is to satisfy people who want something fresh and flamboyant for marketing. The programmatic requirement is to do something that stands apart, an anti-thing.”
Historically, it’s not so surprising that, despite all his whimsy, Jahn was at heart cynical — or perhaps bracingly practical — when it came to theory vs practice. His job, after all, was to sell architecture to clients, not the idea of architecture. The practice backs up the anti-theory. If you look up the history of his firm, Murphy/Jahn, you will find the story of a one-man neoliberal corporate takeover. As detailed by Miller, Jahn joined CF Murphy & Co, in the late 1960s when the firm, a darling of the Daley administration, was working on the McCormick Place convention center. CF Murphy & Co was an advanced, large, vertically integrated architecture firm staffed with a civil engineering department, an accounting department, an audio-visual department, a spun-off (later reintegrated) interiors department, and so on, each with its dedicated staff members.
One-two punched by the end of the Daley administration and the Energy Crisis, the firm entered freefall in the 1970s. Jahn, who had consolidated his power over the years, bought the firm out and became president. As soon as he did, he eliminated almost all of these sub-departments. He fired staff and replaced them with outside consultants, and ran the firm as leanly as possible. In the monograph, Miller characterizes the firm thusly: “In general, the teams are kept small and work around the clock if necessary to avoid layers of supervision. In a profession given to overtime and high-pressure deadlines, Murphy/Jahn has earned a reputation for requiring more out of its staff than almost any other, an outgrowth, perhaps of Jahn’s own prodigious output.” Praxis!
While the lean model of running an architecture firm continues, unfortunately, to this day, Postmodernism, in all its kidcore glory, would start to crumble shortly after Oakbrook Terrace Tower’s completion. By the 1990s, two decades after Learning from Las Vegas and its celebration of vernacular commercial architecture’s effective use of signs and symbols, fatigue towards excessive shed decoration had finally set in. The shift started to emerge in the polemical words of young architects. The most notable (and ideologically frictionless) of these, Rem Koolhaas, bemoaned the touristification of Europe on the one hand in “The Generic City” and the nostalgic “irrelevance” of PoMo-pilled New Urbanist planners on the other in “Whatever Happened to Urban Planning?” In 1997, Ada Louise Huxtable penned The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, about the proliferation of imitation and artifice in contemporary architecture.
Theming, and by extension, childishness (or rather the exploitation of the inner child by corporations) was on the chopping block. In one of the most prescient essays ever written about the built environment, Michael Sorkin took aim specifically at “Disneyfication”, writing: “Disney invokes an urbanism without producing a city. Rather, it produces a kind of aura-stripped hypercity, a city with billions of citizens (all who would consume) but no residents. Physicalized yet conceptual, it’s the utopia of transience, a place where everyone is just passing through. This is its message for the city to be, a place everywhere and nowhere, assembled only through constant motion.” He might as well be talking about the contemporary city.
And yet, while this great divorce was happening between the adults in the room, many of us, including myself, were still children. And as children, in the backseat of American cars, we looked at buildings. The more monumental the buildings, the more, naturally, we looked.
The work of Helmut Jahn (both good and middling) demonstrates that the seduction of architecture works in myriad ways. One of ways is that, through image and spectacle, architecture captures our young imaginations. In adults, it can spark both genuine wonder and nostalgia for not only a specific time, but for a once-playful relationship with the built environment. This is especially true as that environment comes to increasingly immiserate us. Jahn’s, in short, are buildings that make us feel like we can understand how they work and what they mean while also seeming complicated and spectacular. But this pleasure is a double-edged sword, as architecture also conceals, through this very same spectacle, form and, in Postmodernism, signification the ugly realities of capitalism. These realities are of course themselves reproduced in architecture’s division of labor.
That Postmodernism did this imaginary sleight of hand on a specific generation of children, that it did it better than any other architectural movement via the use of the simple image and the invocation of play is a claim I, as a child from that late era, am willing to make. Indeed, Jahn’s 80s work does that for me. Beyond that, the over-representation of Postmodern design in spaces of leisure, consumption, and entertainment, combined with its leakage into the architecture of explicit capital (e.g. banks and corporations) created not only a lexical mismatch but an interesting architectural formula for disappointment. Not only with the secret world of adults, not only with capitalism, but with architecture writ large.
It’s not a Marxist claim to make by any means, but I do think that disappointment is understudied in how aesthetic tastes are formed, tended, changed, and even rescinded. However, as my continued love of Helmut Jahn’s work testifies, understanding the relationship between positive sensorial emotions and negative truths doesn’t necessarily preclude the enjoyment of architecture. At any rate, it shouldn’t ruin it. Rather, for me, it invites an enjoyment that isn’t lost in fantasy or the ever-profitable nostalgia trap, one that can be reconciled with reality, where we all, unfortunately, still live.
Coming Next on The Late Review, a much shorter essay: I Hate Goth Target. Stay tuned.
The Walt Disney Company itself had a chokehold on the movement and its architects, the apotheosis of which was Seaside, Florida, a kind of Mickey Mouse version of Columbus, Indiana. Theming had reached the scale of the planned town.
This was certainly true in the South where I grew up. The skylines of Charlotte, North Carolina, the banking capital of the South, and of then-Wachovia headquarters Winston-Salem, were wholly reshaped by the spindly stylings of César Pelli. The first skyscraper I ever saw, around the age of five or so, was Two Hannover Square in Raleigh, completed in 1991 by the well-known (and very corporate) New York firm Gruzen Samton Steinglass. A mix of art deco stepped-back massing and pink granite a la Robert A.M. Stern, it was an average example of late-Postmodern bank architecture.
De La Garza itself bears striking resemblance to Stirling’s 1972 Olivetti Training School.
Miller, Nory. 1986. Helmut Jahn. Rizzoli.
Another layer of irony on top of Oakbrook Terrace Tower's child-appeal is that it was built on the site of a literal theme park, Kiddie Kingdom. Child me hated that building for that reason.
"It gave us Kidz Bop versions of the Parthenon, the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument." Love this.