Posted Sep 1, 2009, 11:07 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: chicagoland
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Quote:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/aug2009/id20090831_751185.htm
Voices of Innovation August 31, 2009, 1:29PM 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
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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.
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"I see architecture as part of a bigger system,"
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