One of the world’s most influential urban designers, Chicago architect Jeanne Gang is a keynote speaker at in:situ, an international conference in Auckland this month. She talks to Joanna Wane about why size doesn’t mean everything.
Read any story about Chicago architect Jeanne Gang and one of the first things
Sure, they’re spectacular. The 101-storey St. Regis Chicago is a stepped set of three sculpted towers that look like stems of undulating glass. The nearby Aqua building — an early work named skyscraper of the year in 2009 — is even wilder, composed of irregularly shaped concrete floor slabs that extend from the facade as rippled balconies to give residents better access to the surrounding views.
What’s most interesting about them, though, isn’t their height. Aqua’s topography was inspired by layered limestone outcropping along the Great Lakes, with sustainability at the heart of its design. Eco-friendly features include a water-efficient irrigation system, bamboo flooring and effective heat transfer from inside to out. Some 84 per cent of the materials left over after construction went to recycling centres instead of landfills.
The St. Regis, which cost almost US$1 billion to construct, is an engineering marvel. Completed in 2020, it has a reinforced concrete spine and uninhabited “blow-through” floors (the first of their kind in Chicago) to reduce wind-induced sway.
“Chandeliers in the condominiums above and below won’t rattle,” wrote a journalist from the Chicago Tribune after a tour of the tower while it was still under construction. “Whitecaps won’t appear in the toilets. Residents won’t reach for motion sickness pills, as they’ve done in other supertall buildings plagued by high winds.”
Gang laughs when I suggest measuring worth in metres seems a singularly male claim to fame.
“It’s almost like there’s a cult following of this building type — the tallest, the widest, the most area …” she says. “All these stats just go on and on, which is so funny because it’s not the main point of those two buildings. I feel proud of them because they’re good buildings that work from a scale of city, but they also work from the inside out, they’re interesting for people who don’t even live there and they’re safe for birds. They’re doing a lot of things that aren’t what you typically think about [with skyscrapers].”
Gang is one of the big international names converging on Auckland for the in:situ Conference at Spark Arena on February 21. Billed as a day of “inspiration, innovation and conversation”, the keynote speakers include Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a New York-based partner with BIG who oversees urban and landscape projects in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East; and the co-founders of Barclay & Crousse Architecture, which operates out of Paris and Lima, Peru. Facilitating the event is the Guardian’s architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright.
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Advertise with NZME.Described by CBS News as “the most important woman architect anywhere”, Gang established her international architecture and urban design practice Studio Gang in the late 90s. A professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2019. She’s also a birder, so her first visit to New Zealand could include a side trip to somewhere like Tiritiri Matangi, where she might spot a tākahe.
The natural world is a signature influence on her work, not just from a design aesthetic but as a functional model with practical application for how human communities operate, too. “It’s the whole intelligence of nature, from its structure to the way that animal architecture responds to climate,” she says. “From a life of drawing from nature and studying it as an architect, there’s inspiration all the time for me.”
When we talk, it’s early evening in Chicago and Gang has just arrived home after a nine-hour drive through rain and snow from North Carolina, where she’s been on vacation in the Appalachian Mountains. She sounds exhausted but engages with genuine enthusiasm in a wide-ranging discussion about everything from Auckland’s population pressures to my childhood memories of living in Hong Kong in the 1970s and marvelling at the iconic round-windowed skyscraper that was then Asia’s tallest building. At a mere 168m, it’s barely the scale of a respectable bungy jump now.
“It’s unbelievable how Hong Kong has exploded in its height,” she says. “For Auckland, it seems that it must be a really important time to consider how the city wants to grow and accommodate more people, without just sprawling out and taking up all of what they say in France is ‘pleine terre’ [open ground].”
With a chronic housing shortage crashing up against widespread resistance to more medium-density developments, these are challenging times for Auckland. “But also exciting,” she counters. “Often, as architects, we’re action-oriented — looking at contemporary issues or conditions and then trying to use our medium to help make these ideals not just stay on paper or be a long-term plan but actually happen and become reality in the world in our lifetime.”
Studio Gang’s headquarters in Chicago is a 1930s building that once housed a credit union for new migrants from Poland. A New York team operates out of a high-rise in lower Manhattan and smaller offices are based in San Francisco and Paris. The daughter of a community activist (her mother) and an engineer (her dad), Gang describes design’s ability to give rise to change as “actionable idealism”. Her concern with environmental justice is reflected in building projects that have raised public awareness of Chicago’s polluted waterways, promoted biodiversity and been developed in partnership with local communities.
In 2015, she headed a research study on whether architecture could help mitigate police violence and brutality, reimagining police stations as places that serve their community. A nature boardwalk she designed at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo has been called an ideal paradigm of coherence between nature and the urban environment.
“We can do a much better job than what has been done in the past where planning has been used to divide people sometimes or how choices are made over where to put infrastructure or a highway,” she says. “Or where to put a dump.”
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The focus of Gang’s keynote talk at the Auckland conference will be on the public side of museums. Last year, she completed a stunning 21,000sq m expansion to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, creating a massive cave-like atrium with geologically-inspired curving concrete walls. She’ll also share some thoughts on the practice of re-use in architecture, which she explores in her new book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, due out in March.
By 2050, it’s predicted that some two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Gang thinks the delineation between urban and rural centres has already become blurred. “I’m very interested in how people make those divides, politically as well,” she says. “The human footprint is ginormous. My worry with all that is how we accommodate relationships between each other to be less polarised.”
Hosted by Te Kāhui Whaihanga / New Zealand Institute of Architects, the in:situ Conference will be held at Spark Arena on February 21. For more details and bookings, see Nzia.co.nz
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