Revisiting The Skyscraper: Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower

It’s difficult to differentiate between the hundreds of almost identical-looking skyscrapers dotting along Chicago’s beautiful skyline. While varying in height, the majority of the skyscrapers are black, gray, white, rectangular, and often quite indistinguishable from their neighboring structures. Now, enter Jeanne Gang: a successful yet accessible award-winning architect who set her sights on reinventing what architecture can do for the tiring urban landscape. Her first-ever skyscraper is Aqua, a mixed-use residential high-rise on 200 north Columbus Drive, which was completed in 2009. Aqua manages to discreetly breathe in new life to Chicago’s growingly stale condominium scene, standing silently like a nerdy quiet high school girl among a hoard of loud and athletic jocks.

Gang, an Illinois native, received her bachelors in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and continued her education at Harvard University, where she graduated with distinction. She went on to work with famed architect Rem Koolhass in the Netherlands before founding her own Chicago-based firm, Studio Gang, in 1997. Within its fourteen-year life span, the firm has won countless awards and captured global audiences and continues to do so. Their work is even on display in several museums, national as well as international. In the world of contemporary architecture, where standard and uniform designs are abundant, Studio Gang pushes their designs to the limit without dramatically going over the edge.

Jeanne Gang already had several Chicago ventures under her belt before she began to conceptualize Aqua like the Brickweave House, a media production center for Columbia College, a boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo and many others. She is no stranger to the history and familiar forms that have dominated Chicago since the turn of the twentieth century. It should not be a surprise, then, that developer Jim Lowenberg selected her when he had something new in mind for the area in between Millennium Park and Lake Shore Drive. Having received that opportunity, Gang certainly took this project to new heights—Aqua is now the tallest building in the world designed by a woman at 859 feet.

When viewed at eye level, Aqua is not as impressive as one is led to believe from all the publicity and praise. It blends in with its surroundings and seems quite like any other ordinary high-rise. Its only distinctive feature is a break from the linear forms that typically allow audiences to distinguish between the different floors of the building. The balconies seem broken up by ambiguous organic shapes that look as if they are slowly trickling down the sides of the structure.

Aqua’s eloquence can only be experienced when looking directly up at it. Viewers are instantly drawn toward the building’s façade, filled with a beautiful arrangement of undulating balconies that rhythmically surround the rectangular glass building, a reflection of nearby Lake Michigan. Studio Gang’s website refers to it as “a vertical topography shaped by the forces of the city.” The now famous balconies have been altered and stretched by Gang so that people can get the most of their view of the city around them as well as underneath them.

She stays true to her design philosophy—function should not be sacrificed for a new innovative architecture. In fact, as interesting as the wavy features are, they merely mask typical construction of a skyscraper. Yet the subtlety of the design and how Gang slightly tweaked an unexciting feature of a high-rise and completely reimagined in is astounding.

The building has been designed for residential use, but now a Radisson Blu hotel is slated to open in 2012. With an endless number of amenities including a rooftop garden, exercise areas, and views to die for, Aqua makes the most of its location and sustainable design. Although long famous before Aqua’s construction, this is certainly Gang’s breakthrough moment. After recently being awarded a MacArther Genius Grant, Gang is a rising star who is not afraid of using architecture’s limits to create unlimited possibilities.