Jeanne Gang is known for buildings that reshape the skyline. Aqua rises above downtown Chicago in rippling concrete balconies. The St. Regis climbs nearly 1,200 feet beside the river, making Gang the architect of the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. Yet the scale of her work can obscure the quieter idea running through it: architecture is not only about the object being built. It is also about the relationships that object creates.
Gang has described herself as a “relationship builder,” arguing that architects design connections between people as much as they design structures. That principle appears across Studio Gang’s work, from residential towers to parks and boathouses: buildings are treated not as isolated forms, but as participants in larger social and ecological systems.
That way of thinking feels particularly relevant now. As cities make room for new energy systems, denser housing and the infrastructure required by a changing economy, Gang’s work raises a more fundamental question: when we build something new, what should it owe the place already there?
building outward
Gang founded Studio Gang in Chicago in 1997. The practice has since expanded to New York, San Francisco and Paris, but Chicago remains central to both its identity and its most recognizable work. This year, AIA Chicago named Studio Gang the recipient of its 2026 Firm Award, the chapter’s highest honor for an architecture practice.
The skyline made Gang internationally recognizable.
Completed in 2010, Aqua Tower rises 82 stories and 876 feet. Its irregular balconies give the building its distinctive undulating appearance, but they are not simply sculptural. Their shapes were developed in response to views, sunlight and use, creating outdoor terraces while allowing residents to see around neighboring buildings and, in some places, encounter one another across the façade.
A decade later came the St. Regis Chicago. Its three interconnected towers reach 1,198 feet above Lakeshore East. The project made Gang the architect of the tallest building in the world designed by a woman, surpassing a record she had previously set with Aqua.
The distinction is remarkable, but Gang’s larger body of work complicates the idea that architectural ambition is measured simply by height.
Her projects repeatedly return to a smaller scale: the distance between neighbors, the edge of a river, the movement of a bird, the health of an urban pond.
designing relationships
At the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, completed in 2010, Studio Gang transformed an ornamental nineteenth-century pond into a functioning urban habitat. Changes to the pond’s hydrology, vegetation and edges improved water quality and created habitat for resident and migratory species while turning the site into an outdoor classroom and public destination.
Along the Chicago River, the firm’s boathouses operate in a similar way. They provide places to row, gather and learn, but they were also conceived as part of the river’s broader ecological and civic revival. At the Eleanor Boathouse on the South Side, spaces for rowing sit alongside mentoring programs, community events and other public uses.
The pattern is consistent. Gang’s architecture often begins by asking what is already happening around a site, then considering how a building might strengthen those relationships rather than simply occupy the land.
Studio Gang has described the approach as “actionable idealism.” Gang’s own shorthand is even simpler: “start with what’s there.”
the city as habitat
That philosophy has increasingly extended beyond human relationships.
Gang has long drawn from ecological systems and argued that cities should be understood as habitats shared by people and other species. Studio Gang has developed bird-safe building strategies, incorporated habitat restoration into urban projects and pushed for design that considers biodiversity alongside conventional measures of performance.
This year, that work is on view at the Chicago Architecture Center in Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem, an exhibition designed and co-curated by Studio Gang. It examines ways buildings can reduce bird collisions and make cities more hospitable to wildlife, presenting the city not as something separate from nature but as part of an ecosystem.
The subject is unusually concrete. Glass façades, lighting and landscape decisions can have consequences far beyond the people who use a building. The exhibition asks architects and residents to consider those effects as part of design itself.
It is a useful expansion of what responsibility in architecture can mean.
what a building owes its surroundings
The history of architecture often rewards the singular object: the tallest tower, the newest material, the unmistakable silhouette.
Gang’s work does not reject those ambitions. She has built some of the most recognizable structures of her generation. But it repeatedly argues that the building itself is only part of the work.
A balcony can affect whether neighbors see one another. A boathouse can change a community's relationship with a river. A restored pond can become habitat. A façade can either endanger migrating birds or be designed with their movement in mind.
None of those choices solves the larger pressures facing cities. Thoughtful design cannot, on its own, resolve housing shortages, climate change or failing infrastructure. But buildings last long enough that the decisions embedded in them matter.
That may be the more enduring lesson in Gang’s work.
Architecture inevitably changes what surrounds it. The question is whether we consider that change only after the building is finished, or treat it as part of the design from the beginning.
For Gang, the answer has increasingly been the latter: start with what is already there, understand the relationships at stake and build in a way that leaves more of them intact.
Because a building does not end at its walls.
