Hailed as "the flamboyant bad boy of post-modern architecture," Helmut Jahn emerged in the late 1960s as the most brilliant architect of his generation. Born in a farming village near Nuremberg, Germany, he graduated form the Technische Hochschule in Munich and then entered the Illinois Institute of Design in Chicago. The legendary modern architect Mies Van Der Rohe cast a long shadow over both institutions; the young Helmut Jahn took his forerunner's austere rectilinear style as a point of departure, but soon asserted an artistic identity of his own, with curved and octagonal, or as...