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Special Report November 3, 2009, 12:01PM EST

Name to Know: Architect Jeanne Gang

She's bringing the sensuousness of nature, the sustainability of LEED building, and the thrill of the new to Chicago and beyond

By Michael Arndt

James R. Loewenberg needed an image upgrade. The Chicago-based building designer/developer—he is president of Loewenberg Architects and co-CEO of Magellan Development Group—had been pilloried for erecting high rises that were unimaginatively ugly. His Park Millennium tower certainly didn't help. The 57-story apartment building in Chicago's Lakeshore East area was completed in 2002 to jeers. Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, compared it to a missile silo.

As Loewenberg began planning Lakeshore East's centerpiece, an 822-ft.-tall mixed-use tower across the street from Park Millennium, he looked for help from an outside architect. He chose a relative unknown, Jeanne Gang, whose biggest feat until then had been a community college theater. "I didn't want another building by another 'starchitect,' "Loewenberg says. "I thought I could accomplish much more with a fresh young face." He wagered well.

Gang took what would have been one more big box of concrete and glass and turned it into an undulating sculpture by wrapping balconies around the entire structure. The cantilevered projections ebb and flow serpentinely, disappearing entirely here and thrusting out up to 12 feet there. The effect is of a rippling sand dune or a weathered cliff of sedimentary rock. The adornments have a practical side, too: They extend views and shade rooms from the high-in-the-sky summer sun, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Kamin has called the almost-completed Aqua high rise "an exuberant exception to the banal cracker boxes around it, bringing the sensual style of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi to sober, right-angled Chicago." Architecture writer Lynn Becker goes further, declaring that Gang represents a third school of Chicago architecture, 125 years after the first school invented the high rise and the second ushered in Modernism.

designed to leed standards

Gang's opus has grown to include a foster-care center in Chicago and an interior at Illinois Institute of Technology. She also has designed a chiseled and notched 26-story condo tower near the University of Chicago, a 1.3 million-sq.-ft. residential cube in Hyderabad, India, that is fractured into several pieces, and a visitors' hall that terraces up a hillside nature center in Greenville, S.C.

Her structures are intended to be sustainable; most are designed to the Leadership in Energy & Environment Design (LEED) standards of the U.S. Green Building Council. For instance, her "bird nest building" in a wildlife sanctuary in Chicago will be supported by 28 tripods of steel beams scavenged from nearby mills, while its terrazzo floor will be composed of slag. The use of recycled material reduces the project's energy consumption and carbon dioxide output. Another green touch: The tripods will be driven into the earth, avoiding the need to haul away soil for a foundation.

"I see architecture as part of a bigger system," she says. "Every building is not just an object—it's connected to an environment about it. The way I work is kind of like a detective, to find all of the factors that could form the building. And I usually try to produce a couple of ideas or directions and play them out and see how they shape up. We brainstorm and see what's working and what's not. Then we get back together. The concept of the building evolves. It's not like you nail it the first day with the first thought. My philosophy of design is really about making some kind of poetry out of all those factual and scientific criteria."

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