architecture Updated 10th May 2021 Helmut Jahn, one of American architecture's most celebrated figures, dies age 81 Written by Oscar Holland, CNNMegan C. Hills, CNN Helmut Jahn, the architect behind some of America's best-known buildings, has died in a bicycle accident aged 81. The German-American designer, whose high-profile projects include Liberty Place in Philadelphia and Terminal 1 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, was involved in a collision with two vehicles Saturday, according to Cameron Hills Police Department in Illinois. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Born in Germany in 1940, Jahn arrived in the US in the mid-1960s to study under the modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 1967, he joined architecture firm C. F. Murphy Associates, which he would later take full ownership of, before renaming it Murphy/Jahn and then simply Jahn.