Jeanne Gang is the Chief Principal Architect and Founder of MacArthur foundation. She is an architect challenging the aesthetic and technical possibilities of the art form in a wide range of structures.
Always responsive to the specific geography, social and environmental context, and purpose of each project, Gang creates bold yet functional forms for residential, educational, and commercial buildings. Her most highly acclaimed building, Aqua (2010), is an 82-story, mixed-use skyscraper in Chicago.
Jeanne Gang born in 1964 in Illinois leads Studio Gang Architects, a Chicago-based architecture and design firm. Gang’s projects include Aqua, an 82-story mixed-use high-rise, and SOS Children’s Villages Lavezzorio Community Center, a 16,800-square-foot (1,560 m2) foster care community center on Chicago’s South Side.
Gang earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois in 1986 and a Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University in 1993. In 1989, she was an International Rotary Fellow, and she studied at the ETH Swiss Federal University of Technical Studies in Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to founding her own firm, she worked with OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam.
Studio Gang’s work has been exhibited at the International Venice Biennale, the National Building Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and Gang has been featured in publications such as Metropolis and Architecture Magazine. She has received high honors for her work, including an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.
Gang has taught architecture as an adjunct associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1998. She was visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2004, held the Louis I. Kahn professor chair at the Yale School of Architecture in 2005, and was the Graduate Design Studio Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in the spring of 2007.
Achievements include; Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 2009, “Cultural Heroes,” Time Out Chicago, 2008, Iakov Chernikov Prize Nominee, 2008, Academy Award in Architecture, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2006, Emerging Voices Award, Architecture League of New York, 2006, Rave Award Nominee, Wired Magazine, 2004, Chicagoans of the Year, Chicago Tribune, December 2004 and Design Vanguard, Architectural Record, 2001.
Gang’s mastery of the balance between novelty and urban practicality is also evident in the Media Production Center (2010) for Columbia College of Chicago, an imaginative fusion of found material, engineering, and structural economy that reflects the avant-garde nature of the school’s work in film, television, and interactive media.
Her design for the in-progress Ford Calumet Environmental Center, a 27,000-square-foot resource center on an industrial site south of Chicago, includes salvaged materials from the surrounding area and incorporates advanced systems in heating, cooling, and water reclamation.
International projects, such as a major residential complex in Hyderabad, India, that makes use of traditional Indian building methods and materials, further demonstrate Gang’s integrative approach to contemporary building. An emerging talent with a diverse and growing body of work, Gang is setting a new industry standard through her effective synthesis of conventional materials, striking composition, and ecologically sustainable technology.
