A towering heroine

Chicago has a new local hero: Jeanne Gang, 45, an American architect who recently completed construction of the Aqua Tower, an 82-story luxury skyscraper that towers over the city's downtown area. Aqua Tower was designated the fifth-tallest building erected worldwide over the past year. But beyond its respectable place on this list, it is also noteworthy due to the identity of its designer: It is the tallest building ever designed by a woman - a rather impressive achievement in the world of architecture, which is almost totally dominated by men, and by quite a bit of sexism.

Surprisingly, this turns out to be the first tower that Gang, who has run her own firm for the last 13 years, ever designed. At a festive dinner at the home of friends, she met a real estate developer named James Loewenberg, who had acquired the rights to a particularly strategic location in Chicago, between Lake Michigan and Millennium Park, and wanted to build "a unique project" there, as she put it. Until then, she had worked mainly on designing public structures, but the new challenged immediately intrigued her.

The planning work proceeded quickly, and construction of the tower began a few weeks before an anticipated event: the outbreak of the credit crisis in the United States, which led to the global financial crisis. "It turns out that the timing was crucial," Gang said in a phone conversation from her office. "Otherwise, there's no way we would have managed to get funding from the banks."

Aqua, which contains around 750 apartments and a business hotel, is made of the same basic materials that typify most skyscrapers: concrete, galvanized steel and lots and lots of glass. But Gang managed to imbue it with a refined, almost feminine touch, using a series of thin, curved balconies that wind around the building from base to top. It looks as if someone had very skillfully placed a delicate topography of hills and valleys on the facade. To anyone looking at the tower, whether from up close or far away, it is clear that it is a massive building. But the flowing lines endow it with a unique sense of lightness and exultation.

"The view is the main thing that people look for when they purchase an apartment in a residential tower," Gang said, explaining the motivation for the design. "But because of the high density in downtown Chicago, you see a lot of towers and very few views. The topography reflects places where the tower can suddenly expand and provide residents with unexpected sights. Each apartment has a balcony that suddenly reveals a piece of the lake or a corner of the city, which in an ordinary square tower would be blocked."

Using a computerized model, views of various points in the city from the tower and views of the tower from various points in the city were both carefully checked, and the shape evolved accordingly. The design of each of the 82 floors is completely different, because each one is essentially a cross-section of a three-dimensional body.

The final stage of the design focused on maximizing the best wind and sun exposures. It also took bird migration patterns into account - including the way in which birds see (or actually do not see) glass walls.

"Birds tend to crash into towers because the sun reflects off them," Gang explained. "In Aqua, we used a special glass we developed that is not transparent to animals, but appears transparent to humans. Even the shape of the balconies interrupts the continuum of the glass, which further reduces the risk of bird collisions."

On the windowsill in Gang's office are several birds' nests that she gathered in the area. She said she admires their seemingly humble, yet functional, aesthetic.

Chicago is a world capital for skyscrapers. In 1884, the first modern skyscraper - the headquarters of a large insurance company - was built there, using an innovative technology based on metal frames and screen walls that is astonishingly reminiscent of the standard building methods today. Several dozen skyscrapers later, in 1974, the 108-story Sears Tower was built, and it retained the title of the world's tallest skyscraper for almost 25 years. Chicago is the place where architects like Louis Sullivan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought the encounter between engineering, design and aesthetics to a peak and created some of the world's most impressive and state-of-the-art towers.

Aqua is another milestone in the city's skyscraper history. First, because it could not have been built using 20th-century technologies and tools - and in truth its construction is quite an accomplishment even by today's standards. And second, because Gang managed to find a way to turn a routine glass residential tower into something very exciting. It is an architectural delight that satisfied the critics as well as the developers' budget (which totaled $300 million in this case). Such buildings are not built every day, neither by women and nor by men.

Ostensibly, Aqua Tower's unusual form shares a bond with the creations of other showy architects of the early 21st century, led by the British Zaha Hadid, who proved that it is possible to build whatever can be designed with computer assistance, and even more than that. But Gang, who said that as a child, she actually dreamed of being an engineer, takes a completely different position than her British colleague. While Hadid very skillfully designs fantastical buildings whose power lies in their design, with Gang, the quality of the form stems from a long list of parameters, some of them measured completely subjectively. This comprehensive creative vision must apparently be credited to her studies at Harvard and at the prestigious ETH Swiss Federal University of Technical Studies in Zurich, and to the two years she spent working in Holland with superstar architect Rem Koolhaas.

Either way, Gang feels that Aqua brings a "vital organic sensitivity to the city." When asked whether she sees it is a feminine alternative to the resounding phallus of the skyscraper, she thinks for a moment and answers with a smile that at the end of the day, "it's still a tall building." The question of the tower's "sexuality" has come up many times in recent months, she noted.

Skyscraper construction is a very popular topic of conversation in Chicago, both in office kitchens and in public parks, and new towers immediately merit an extensive media blitz. "A few weeks ago, a man who recognized me from my picture in the newspaper came up to me at the gym," Gang recalled. "He told me that he really likes the building and starting reciting all sorts of statistics about it that even I didn't know."

But the most prominent statistic, as mentioned, is Gang's title as the woman who built the tallest tower ever. "We work in an environment dominated by men, and I think that I managed to prove it does not have to be this way," she said. "I hope that in the not-too-distant future, there will be more women setting similar records."