Jeanne Gang: Reflecting Nature in Architecture and Bridging the Gap Between Community and Structure

Jeanne Gang is a Chicago native and architect, who has spent her career tying together communities and environmental sustainability through her architecture, featured all over the world, including in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, among other places. Gang has two towers in Chicago: The St. Regis — previously known as Vista Towers — and the Aqua Tower. Both are located along the Chicago River. The St. Regis began construction in 2016 and was completed in 2020. It is the third tallest tower in Chicago, and is only surpassed by the Trump Tower due to the spire on the top of the structure. It is also the tallest building in the world designed by a female architect. The Aqua Tower — which began construction in 2007 and was finished in 2009 — has one of the largest green roofs in the city and is designed to be environmentally healthy.

The biggest connection so far that I have found between Gang’s architecture and The Creative Spark by Agustin Fuentes is the kind of beauty that humans tend to emulate in their creative works. Gang often uses contemporary design styles in her works and she usually connects it to modern day trends of environmental sustainability, reflecting nature in her designs. Her two Chicago structures are no exception to this. The St. Regis, which is paneled in blue glass that curves in and out as you move up the sides of the building, is designed to look like the waves of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. The Aqua Tower, which is characterized by wavy white balconies of varying sizes, is designed to look like the wind that flows around the building. The balconies are actually also designed to help move some of that pressure from the wind away from the building and make it more structurally sound. As is pointed out in The Creative Spark, human beings have long had a tendency to replicate nature and animals in their artwork, whether it be cave paintings or the use of their hide to make clothing and jewelry. Gang follows a similar process in her reflection of nature through her artwork, showing that she truly has love and appreciation through her surroundings.

The St. Regis was originally designed to have mass tuned dampers — essentially large jugs of water placed at the top of the buildings that are used to keep buildings upright even when they are faced with intense winds. However, after they began construction for the building the builders realized that this would not be enough to ensure structural soundness of the building. The group all reconvened, and through further collaboration and technology, they decided to remove two floors of the tallest building, allowing the wind to pass through rather than putting too much pressure on the outside of the building. Without this collaboration, the construction would have been stalled further and we may not have the buildings, which have become such a major piece of our skyline today. Gang also talks about her motivation as being to create real world change in her communities and bring buildings to life that bridge the gap between people and architecture. She refers to this as “actionable idealism.”