I\u2019m chasing Jeanne Gang up a series of rough wooden ladders made of two-by-fours to the 25th floor of the job site at Aqua, a massive high-rise condo in downtown Chicago a few blocks from Lake Michigan and Millennium Park. It\u2019s the top, for today, of what will be an 82-story skyscraper in Lakeshore East, a new neighborhood above the former Illinois Central rail yard. The crane is preparing to launch a table form from a few floors below and drop it onto steel braces being bolted to the reinforced-concrete core. But right now it\u2019s swinging bundles of rebar through the sky as steelworkers drill holes and weave metal strands through structural columns. Cement masons sidle around the platform banging it into place, framing the curving edges of the formwork and pulling mechanical elements through the plywood.<\/p>\n
This will be one of the tallest buildings in Chicago, the birth\u00adplace of the modern skyscraper. It will also be one of the greenest and most appealing tall buildings in a place that has produced some of the country\u2019s best architecture. It feels like I\u2019m in a tree house, and it isn\u2019t just the maze of wooden ladders. It\u2019s also Gang\u2019s quiet enjoyment and self-possessed determination. She\u2019s unfazed by the size of the project or her achievement at a mere 44 years old. Barely a dozen years after moving to Chicago and kicking off her own practice, she\u2019s making a leap to what young architects rarely and female architects almost never have done\u2014building on a scale that will have a major impact on their city.<\/p>\n
But the tree-house feeling comes more than anything from Gang\u2019s habits of thought about materials and construction processes. The workers, to her mind, are building a nest. The bundles of rebar are twigs collected and threaded together, and the layers of concrete pumped up and vibrated into place are like mounds. Their composition and how they merge together are what really drive form-making in her studio.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou couldn\u2019t have done all that variety ten years ago,\u201d she says of the undulating slabs. \u201cBecause our tools are connected to digital tools on the job site, they can lay out these different curves without too much trouble. It takes an unbelievable amount of human know-how and coordination to put a building together, and architects sometimes focus on technology so much that they fetishize it. I think it helps to embrace the messy side of the construction site and understand it more, as opposed to just hanging out in the studio focused on 3-D drawings.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Aqua, she took a standard slab-and-column structure and gently tweaked it by extending the reinforced-concrete slabs to create rippling balconies that serve as passive solar shading, give residents enhanced views of the city, and produce a new landmark in the skyline. \u201cIt\u2019s part of the construction idea of the building,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I start out going, \u2018Here\u2019s my shape, how do I make it?\u2019 It\u2019s more like, \u2018How do I build it?\u2019 And then we developed the form in relation to the views around it and the environmental targets that needed to be achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n
The environmental features just strike me as good architecture and urbanism: conversion of a brownfield site, proximity to mass transportation, passive east-west orientation, heat-resistant or reflective glass where balconies don\u2019t already provide shading, and water collection and storage to irrigate a green roof. She was able to incorporate most of it without any impetus from the client, who later saw an interest in applying for LEED certification.<\/p>\n
After chasing her back down the wooden ladders and around 23 flights of stairs, I jump into Gang\u2019s hybrid Prius to visit her most recently finished project, a foster-care-counseling and community center on the South Side. On the way, she drives past Millennium Park and points out Anish Kapoor\u2019s brightly polished stainless-steel Cloud Gate<\/i> sculpture, which absorbs the entire Chicago skyline onto its glossy surface. She has mentioned it a few times, and I immediately grasp its sig\u00adnifi\u00adcance: before long, Aqua will appear there alongside Skidmore, Owings & Merrill\u2019s Sears Tower, Edward Durell Stone\u2019s Aon Center, Louis Sullivan\u2019s Gage Building, and Daniel Burnham\u2019s People\u2019s Gas Building.<\/p>\n
A native of Belvidere, Illinois\u2014a small town beyond the outskirts of Chicagoland\u2014and the daughter of a civil engineer, Gang developed an affection for materials, buildings, and the landscape watching her dad trace roads and bridges through rural Illinois and taking summer road trips to engineering landmarks across the country. \u201cI really like roads still,\u201d she says. \u201cGoing on a road trip, each one is like a linear piece of infrastructure that connects spaces. I always remember going to Mesa Verde, this big canyon out West where cliff dwellers are living in the face, but on top it\u2019s this totally flat mesa. Things like that just get your imagination going. I didn\u2019t come from a town that had much architecture, except we did have one tiny building by Frank Lloyd Wright.\u201d<\/p>\n
After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), she spent a few years commuting between the Office for Met\u00adropolitan Architecture\u2019s (OMA) office in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais project in Lille, and the seminal Maison \u00e0 Bordeaux before returning to Illinois. After a short stint at Booth Han\u00adsen, in Chicago, she struck out on her own.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a hunch that Jeanne had,\u201d says Mark Schendel, her partner in the firm, and also a GSD grad and OMA alum, who joined her in Chicago in 1998. \u201cShe could have gone to New York or Los Angeles or some other place to get started, but she had a couple of things going for her here\u2014a certain knowledge of the city and people in the area\u2014and it seemed that Chicago had been a little bit complacent and sleepy architecturally for some twenty years. She saw that the city had this untapped potential. There was a clientele and an opportunity, and being outside the center of a design nexus, the spotlight is not as hot, so clients might go for a talented but untested firm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gang quickly made herself a fixture in the area\u2019s architectural firmament, beginning with a 1997 commission to build the Starlight Theatre, in Rockford, Illinois, an $8.5 million open-air performance space with a folding kinetic roof on the campus of Rock Valley College, not far from her hometown. \u201cJeanne is very much a Midwestern architect,\u201d says Stanley Tigerman, who has collaborated with Gang on several exhibitions, a book, and an upcoming unreleased project. \u201cShe got nothing from Harvard as best as I can tell. Her work is not frivolous, which you would expect from an Ivy League school. It\u2019s about structure and construction. It\u2019s rational but also poetic, and she\u2019s quite willing to take a risk with structure. It\u2019s a very Chicago kind of thing, the fascination with how you make things, how you structure things, how materials play into form. She will take a material and push it to its limit and a little further. She has immense courage, therefore she\u2019s as good an architect as they get, gender notwithstanding, because I don\u2019t know a lot of guys that have the balls to do what she does.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gang has created an information map pinpointing buildings of note that appear in Chicago\u2019s American Institute of Architects guide. A lot of her work up to now has happened in areas she calls \u201carchitecture deserts,\u201d neighborhoods cut off from the potentially transformative experience of inspiring spaces. \u201cIt correlates very closely with race,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can see how certain segments of the population are not even getting exposed to architecture. It\u2019s so crazy because architecture can really transform your life, especially if you experience it at a very early age.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studio Gang\u2019s community center for the SOS Children\u2019s Vil\u00adlage, a nonprofit that provides housing and social services to foster families on Chicago\u2019s South Side, is located in a tough neighborhood next to a railway overpass on a donated sliver of land where the organization had already started building two rows of vernacular single-family and foster homes. Gang\u2019s task was to collect donated materials as they became available and use them to craft a building that would serve as a soft entryway to the block, connect with the neighborhood, and create a new kind of spatial experience inside for foster families and the surrounding community.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe project is really about finding a process to deal with in-kind donations and leftovers,\u201d she says. \u201cOriginally we had this brick screen that showed the space in between the layers of the facade, but the price was just not working, so at some point I said to the client, \u2018Why don\u2019t we just take the brick off the building? It\u2019s only a screen anyway.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
The resulting corner pavilion is a deceptively simple cantilevered structure with wavy bands created by unevenly pouring three different mixes of concrete, leaving traces of the construction process. The lighter concrete has more portland cement in it, the gray more fly ash, and the dark one a different aggregate, making the last two stronger as structural elements. \u201cWe\u2019re supposed to stay out of means and methods because that\u2019s only the responsibility of the contractor,\u201d Gang says. \u201cBut you\u2019ve got to get into means and methods, otherwise how are you going to know how to make it or what\u2019s possible? Usually your general contractor is standing between you and the subs, but when you\u2019re engaging the material at this level they have to bring you together with the people actually doing the work. This was poured-in-place concrete, and the contractor said, \u2018There\u2019s going to be a big ugly joint because you cannot pour it all at once.\u2019 So we said, \u2018What if we just use different mixes to emphasize the variation and preserve the fluidity of the material?\u2019 Concrete is always treated like it\u2019s a solid stone material, but it\u2019s really this fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the entrance, two staircases flooded with daylight ascend to a large community room and a wing of counseling offices, forming a gateway that doubles as seating for film screenings. The ground-floor classrooms and play areas, each with access to an outdoor playground, are splashed with bright nonprimary colors and decked with carpets donning simple figurative patterns. It\u2019s as first-class as it gets, donated materials or not, and the impact on the community is already visible. The surrounding blocks have all been spruced up with fresh coats of paint and repointed bricks. As people from the neighborhood walk up in their church clothes and make their way upstairs for a wake, a teenager watching us tour the building flashes a beaming smile. \u201cIf somebody experiences a building like this as a kid, it\u2019s really going to change their outlook,\u201d Gang says. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re trying to do projects in the architecture desert.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back at the studio\u2014with at least four projects well into schematic design and construction documents and a concept for a high-rise housing block in Hyderabad, India, being sent out in about an hour\u2014the 30 or so members of Studio Gang look surprisingly relaxed. Teams of designers are grouped in hives of activity throughout the office, one working on a film-and-media school for Chicago\u2019s Columbia College that uses sunlight and framing devices to simulate cinematic effects, another on a condo development next to Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, whose form is determined by passive solar strategies, unit sizes, and CAD engineering tools that allow as much light as possible through the structure.<\/p>\n
Schendel, married to Gang since 1998, has been managing things back in the office and gets a lot of credit for the collegial atmosphere. While Gang is slightly secluded at the back in a private office with a door and a row of bird\u2019s nests along the windowsill, he sits at a long desk near the front that\u2019s a bit like a captain\u2019s mast, directing activity. Once in a while he calls her in to look at a drawing, but otherwise things seem to be humming along.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s a strong and talented designer, and doesn\u2019t put that in anybody\u2019s face here,\u201d Schendel says. \u201cShe\u2019s easy to work with in that regard. She\u2019s going to say what she has to say about a job and give a strong opinion, but she enjoys very much collaborating and hearing other people\u2019s ideas. If there\u2019s anything I offer to it, it\u2019s listening carefully but being firm when you have to maintain a schedule. My style is to let people take as much responsibility as they can and empowering everybody to achieve what\u00adever level of responsibility on a project they can.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Hyderabad team is crowded around the conference-room table flipping through the book of drawings, joking, and checking for spelling errors. One of the designers comes in with an adjusted rendering showing a detail of its tiered courtyard, and everyone cheers. \u201cThis is much better,\u201d Gang says. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be perfect. We\u2019re almost there!\u201d She heads back to her office to finish the submission text.<\/p>\n
The initial concept for Hyderabad was to mirror the style of traditional Indian homes on the scale of the high-rise; cascading balconies in the courtyard, inspired by the ornamented columns and friezes of the Gujarat stepwells, were meant to preserve cool air in the interior. But the client wanted to market the development as separate buildings, so they sliced the rectangular block in a stepped pattern to create air corridors in between. \u201cI like to bounce things off people,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m less likely to sit in here and do a sketch and then deliver it. I would more likely think of an idea and go out there immediately and ask, \u2018What do you think of this?\u2019 I have to hear a response.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the rest of the office slowly assembles around dark wooden tables lit by homemade pendant lamps in the kitchen, popping open their Friday afternoon beers and bags of chips. The studio, a former bank building in Wicker Park, was renovated and expanded last summer using recycled materials. Behind them on the balcony, a few signs of spring sprout from rooftop plantings: a miniature catalpa tree, English ivy, and wisteria and trumpet vines that extend over fanning trellises made of welded rebar.<\/p>\n
The trellises are another sign of things to come at Studio Gang: they were built to test ideas for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, a project on the far South Side that takes Gang\u2019s affinity for nest\u00ading metaphors to a logical extreme. It will be composed entirely of materials salvaged from the surrounding industrial landscape, with a mesh of recycled steel arranged like wild grasses and criss\u00adcrossing columns resembling tepees enclosing an observation deck that incorporates geothermal heating, water-collection systems, and wind turbines, and will look out on 117 acres of wilderness.<\/p>\n
Gang has participated in many local advocacy projects over the years. When the city was talking about issuing its last remaining casino license way out by the airport in 2002, she sent out a series of postcards with speculative renderings of an urban eco-casino. In 2003 Tigerman invited her to envision a new gateway to Chicago, and she reconceived its pedestrian highway overpasses as green markets and urban farms.<\/p>\n
By Schendel\u2019s desk I notice an oversize postcard from a group opposed to a children\u2019s museum the mayor wants to build in Grant Park. I ask her whether it\u2019s something she\u2019s involved in. \u201cI usually don\u2019t get involved in things that are negative,\u201d she says. \u201cThey want to build it, great. I\u2019m more interested when there\u2019s a potential that is not being seen. What could it be? It\u2019s just like, wait, there\u2019s a potential here for architecture, for cities, for urban density, for all kinds of things. My thing is more like trying to get something positive to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch videos featuring Gang\u2019s SOS Children\u2019s Vil\u00adlage and Aqua tower below. Videos were produced by Chicago\u2019s Spirit of Space<\/i><\/p>\n