Courtney Martin finds that the field of architecture is still full of Howard Roarks:
Architect Jeanne Gang‘s new tower, Aqua, stands in the center of Chicago with an attention-grabbing facade that appears to undulate like a wave reaching for the sky rather than the shore. It’s a nice surprise to find that the critics have largely avoided drawing overly simplified parallels between the curvy construction and 44-year-old Gang’s gender, conspicuous in a field where women are few and far between. Aqua, in fact, is the tallest skyscraper designed by a woman — and a fairly young one at that.
Gang herself doesn’t attribute the highly original style of Aqua to her sex, emphasizing instead how much she values design that truly does justice to the context and constituency. She told New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, “I like to do research about a place, about materials, and about a program.” In other words, she cares whether the building serves the community in and around it, rather than whether it is another “fetishized object” that is beloved by critics but not by the people who use it every day. The Chicago Tribune praised Gang: “She has a gift for coaxing visual poetry out of the most prosaic materials.”
