Photo: © Studio/Gang/Architects
December 2006
Gang Way
Jeanne Gang is muscling her way up
into the Chicago skyline on equal parts innovation and iconoclasm
By Charles Shaw
Jeanne Gang’s coming-out party was in 2004, when her “Best Nest” building won a design competition for the new Ford/Calumet Environmental Center. This $6.8 million education building, which will be completed in mid-2008, demonstrates the sustainable principles of reuse by its choice of “abundant, nearby, and discarded” building materials collected from the Calumet industrial region. It will feature geothermal heat pumps, earth tubes, a biomass boiler, wind turbines and water collection systems.
Only a year later, she stepped out onto the world stage with the unveiling of Aqua, an 850-foot genre-bending skyscraper in the mold of Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina Towers or Sir Norman Foster’s Swiss Re Tower in London. Spectacular in both its size and originality, Aqua’s structural uniqueness is expressed by an undulating façade of balconies traversing a narrow core, that swell and crest like ocean waves. It’s cultural uniqueness is found in the fact that when it broke ground in October it also shattered the glass ceiling of a field dominated by testosterone and male ego. Aqua is on its way to becoming the tallest skyscraper ever designed by a woman.
Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, called it “Chicago’s most sensuous skyscraper.” This jaw-slacking neo-modern tower (don’t call it postmodern, Aqua’s significance is about a lot more than its façade) affords each of the residents their own personal, unimpeded view through the dense thicket of skyscrapers along Chicago’s eastern shore. Aqua anchors the billion-dollar Lake Shore East redevelopment plan on the former site of the Illinois Central rail yards, and an ad-hoc golf course has morphed into a park surrounded by a hedgerow of seven new residential towers.
Studio Gang’s ascendancy to the ranks of the international arcouture is the result of the convergence of a few historical precedents. First, Aqua’s signature height and design makes it a significant presence in the Chicago skyline. Deeper, though, the design of Aqua itself symbolized the use of emerging technology and green design techniques that are changing the field of architecture. Gang used a laser to precision-cut the scale models, and a satellite-guided laser will be used to precision-pour the concrete into the wavy façade. Then of course there was her most notable feat, breaking down the door to one of the last remaining boys clubs.
Photo: Paul Natkin, www.natkin.net
Gang was unprepared for how important Aqua would quickly become (a quick Google search for “Aqua, skyscraper” reveals over 110,000 hits), not only to the world of architecture and design but also to the average person. She admits to being totally unaware of what the skyline meant to Chicagoans, and how certain buildings here become de facto public structures because their iconic visibility.
Gang, like her colleague Doug Farr, is helping reinvent the role of the architect as a cultural and community figure, something of a whole other stripe than the ivory “Starchitect.” The old Chicago archetype—the brooding, bombastic, bellicose Graham or Sullivan or Jahn—has given way to the collaborative, holistic, affably conscious design memes of Studio Gang and Farr Associates. Where the imperial nature of modernism claimed cultural supremacy and attempted to squeeze the natural world into its pre-cast forms, Gang and her fellow community of U.S. Green Building Council-certified designers are showing us how we can coexist and operate as part of nature.
Other Studio Gang projects in development include an entry in the recent Architecture for Humanity competition to redesign post-Katrina homes in Biloxi, Mississippi, and a year-round green market planned for a stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in Logan Square featuring an eco-roof that will use solar power to heat water and provide electricity. The Lincoln Park Zoo hired Gang to help reimagine the South Pond of Lincoln Park as a natural habitat space. And this year will see the completion of the 9/11 “island” memorial she designed for the city of Hoboken, NJ.
Gang sees the entire profession of architecture undergoing a kind of “splintering revolution,” where the very approach to design is changing. “You have architects like Calatrava,” Gang says, a wry smirk at the corner of her mouth, “who come out and have a little performance and do a little sketch and voila! That’s the concept for the building. We approach it more like a process of discovering what is important about a building, and from there the building begins to take shape.” It’s another way of revisiting Louis Sullivan’s maxim, form follows function, which Aqua represents, in a way that may surprise you.
Across the hall from the main office of Studio Gang is their model studio, where hulking in the center of the room is a massive scale model of the Lake Shore East plan, complete with a finished model of the undulating Aqua. Gang then holds up a three-foot high cuboid of cardboard, with a number of pieces of orange string affixed to the sides.
“This is how Aqua began,” she laughs. “The strings are so we could check the sight-lines here in the scale model space. It’s funny, people assume we began with the water theme and the wave design, but that came to us later. It was an organic process that began as a mission to give everybody, particularly those units on the lower floors, a good view [the Function], and it evolved into this [the Form].” She rests her hand atop the scale model like a proud mother and beams. “It’s a trip.”
Charles Shaw is Editor-in-Chief of Chicago’s Conscious Choice.
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