"I've never looked at a suburban building as being a minor building and an urban building as being a major building"
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Jahn’s line is a quiet provocation aimed at architecture’s most persistent snobbery: the idea that “real” culture lives downtown, while the suburbs are a visual footnote. By refusing the minor/major split, he’s not just defending office parks and edge cities; he’s challenging the profession’s habit of using geography as a proxy for significance. In the architectural imagination, “urban” often equals dense, historic, and morally serious, while “suburban” gets coded as disposable, banal, or politically suspect. Jahn short-circuits that hierarchy.
The intent reads as both pragmatic and ideological. Pragmatic, because late-20th-century development patterns made the suburb a primary stage for corporate power, infrastructure, and daily life. Ideological, because modern architecture has long framed itself as an urban reform project, a machine for progress that looks best against a skyline. Jahn, a high-tech modernist working heavily on commercial commissions, is insisting that a building’s “major-ness” comes from performance, ambition, and impact, not zip code.
The subtext is also self-defense. Architects who build outside the traditional cultural capitals are often treated as service providers rather than authors. Jahn pushes back: if a suburban building shapes how people work, commute, and inhabit a landscape, it participates in civic life even without a streetwall and a subway stop.
Context matters: postwar decentralization, corporate campuses, and the globalization of cities blurred the old center-periphery map. Jahn’s refusal of the binary anticipates the present, where “downtown vs. sprawl” is less a moral truth than a design choice with consequences.
The intent reads as both pragmatic and ideological. Pragmatic, because late-20th-century development patterns made the suburb a primary stage for corporate power, infrastructure, and daily life. Ideological, because modern architecture has long framed itself as an urban reform project, a machine for progress that looks best against a skyline. Jahn, a high-tech modernist working heavily on commercial commissions, is insisting that a building’s “major-ness” comes from performance, ambition, and impact, not zip code.
The subtext is also self-defense. Architects who build outside the traditional cultural capitals are often treated as service providers rather than authors. Jahn pushes back: if a suburban building shapes how people work, commute, and inhabit a landscape, it participates in civic life even without a streetwall and a subway stop.
Context matters: postwar decentralization, corporate campuses, and the globalization of cities blurred the old center-periphery map. Jahn’s refusal of the binary anticipates the present, where “downtown vs. sprawl” is less a moral truth than a design choice with consequences.
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| Topic | Art |
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