Politics & Power Quote by Helmut Jahn

There’s a blunt, almost jet-lagged candor in Jahn’s line: it lands like a sketch made with a thick marker, not a fine pen. “Like American buildings” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a quick formal comparison - big footprints, big plates, big appetite. Underneath, it’s a provocation about what modernity chooses to optimize: rentable area, spectacle, speed, and the developer’s spreadsheet over the older humanist bargain architecture once promised.

Jahn came up in a late-20th-century moment when corporate modernism learned to speak fluently in glass and steel, and when America’s commercial building culture treated air and daylight less as rights than as amenities you could price. By pointing at China and saying “like American,” he’s refusing the easy Western narrative that pins environmental indifference on “elsewhere.” The barb is aimed at a global system and the exporting of a particular building logic: deep floor plates that make daylight a privilege for the perimeter, mechanical ventilation as a substitute for genuine air, and cities shaped by metrics rather than lungs.

The line also carries the impatience of an architect who knows those choices aren’t neutral. “People don’t care” sounds like a shrug, but it’s really a critique of whose preferences count - the occupants who live with stale interiors, or the clients who buy scale. It’s a reminder that architecture isn’t just taste; it’s policy, culture, and power poured into concrete.