Jeanne Gang is an Illinois-born architect, sustainability advocate, and founder of the Chicago-based architecture and urbanism firm Studio Gang. Her work focuses on innovative designs that encompass environmental and ecological sustainability issues. Studio Gang is a collaboration of over 90 architects, designers, and thinkers that works with experts both within and outside of the discipline of architecture. The firm contributes to research as well — Gang has written for a variety of publications, including a piece on managing mining of the deep seabed for Science magazine. She has been a professor at several universities: Harvard, Princeton, Rice, and IIT to name a few. “Teaching, exhibitions, independent research, and my writing are fuel for our projects,” said Gang in her interview with CLAD magazine.
Her best known work in Chicago is probably the Aqua Tower, an 82 story, 876 foot, multipurpose high rise that serves as a hotel, offices, rental apartments, condominiums, and houses one of Chicago’s largest green roofs. The unique undulating shape of the building was crafted not only for its aesthetic appeal but also to help prevent bird collisions along with the fitted etched glass that makes the windows more visible. Also notable, the Aqua Tower is the tallest building designed by a female-led team, though Gang hopes that angle will not be as important in the near future.
Gang has a fascination for materials that started in her youth. As a child, she was “always making stuff.” “I just liked to make space and build things, to work with materials, to test them, try and break them.” Her inspiration also came from family road trips. “My earliest memories are (...) filling up my suitcase with a rock from every place we visited. I still have a collection of rocks, pine cones, earth, and birds’ nests. The things that nature produces are just incredible.” Gang had natural influences in mind while working on her first project, developing a new college theatre in Rockford, IL with a flower-like retractable roof. Clearly, Gang has been a collector since early in life, both literally and figuratively. She was soaking up her experiences with nature which later served as inspiration for her projects while also collecting physical momentos from her childhood trips.
Speaking with Nea Arts magazine on her creative process, Gang reports that inspiration comes from multiple sources. When working on a project, Gang and her colleagues create a reading list of research around the topic that they are dealing with which establishes a shared knowledge base for all the contributors. “So many times,” Gang says, “inspiration comes from just reading about a subject and where the mind starts to take you.” She explains further:
The other inspiration comes when you are not really trying, and you are just experiencing the city or something in nature; it is from direct observation of the world around you. A lot of the times, for me, it is the natural world or a phenomena that I come into contact with —whether it is a storm or some kind of biological occurrence or animal or nature or something in a museum—those kind of things.
Gang uses observation of nature to aid experiences of insight. Some ideas strike her when she does not expect it, something just clicks in her brain while taking in the natural world around her.
She also reveals herself to be adept at analogy when she explained that when interacting with allied professions or fields she can “suddenly make connections and synthesize information about my own knowledge or what we are doing at the studio with something that might be happening in the sciences or in urban planning or even in policy.”
Jeanne Gang definitely exemplifies Amabile’s Componential Model of Creativity, as she harnesses domain relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes (analogy, concepts, etc.), and seems to be fairly intrinsically motivated by her love for making things, especially sustainable buildings that collaborate with the existing natural environment.
https://www.cladglobal.com/digital/index1.cfm?mag=CLADmag&codeid=31800&linktype=story&ref=n&issue=2017%20issue%202 (starts on page 44)
I thought this was a really interesting article. I was especially impressed by the fact that she constructed the Chicago building so that birds do not fly into it as easily. I know that has been happening more and more recently, so much so that I know a professor at Loyola (probably several others too) is researching it. Overall, I really enjoyed reading your article, and I'm not usually fan of architecture.
ReplyDeleteAs an architecture buff myself, I really love what Gang is doing in terms of making a space aesthetically pleasing, functional, and environmentally conscious. I particularly liked the parallel you drew between Gang's childhood fascination with materials, building, and nature and her creative process as an adult. I feel like there is something child-like in her creations. No one wants another boring concrete prison-like building. It's creations like Aqua that make the city skyline so uniquely beautiful. I'm a big believer in the idea that spaces have power and energy, and It seems like Gang is using her talents to maximize the beauty and functionality of a space.
ReplyDeleteI like how you talked about how Gang's finding inspiration in nature. I think her creative products reflect nature in a way that might change cityscapes drastically in the future. Do you think Gang will venture into environmentally-friendly architecture in the future because of this inspiration?
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