Risk And Reward

Innovative Designs Build A Young Architect's Reputation

November 09, 2003|By James Ylisela Jr. James Ylisela Jr. is a frequent contributor to the Magazine.

Jeanne Gang is having trouble with stone.

We're climbing through the unfinished floors of her building-in-the-making, a program center for the Chinese American Service League, when Gang's cell phone rings. It seems the stonemason she's hired for an exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., can't hone the stone the way she wants it and still meet the deadline.

Gang is one of four architects picked to demonstrate innovative uses of building materials, and she's creating a marble curtain from 619 pieces of stone connected like a jigsaw puzzle. Building with stone typically relies on compression, with each section supporting those resting upon it, and Gang's design shows that thinly cut stone, hanging in tension and reinforced with woven glass fiber, can bear substantial weight.

Honing the stone makes it more translucent and quite beautiful, but the mason is the least of Gang's worries. The stone supplier can't deliver the marble in the size she needs, so Gang flies to New York and spends eight hours recalibrating her design with the project engineer. They make the puzzle pieces smaller--a solution that satisfies the supplier and the stonemason--and the project is back on track.

"If you want to push design into new areas, you have to work closely across the boundaries of people's trades and professions," Gang observes later. "If you know the questions to ask, you can pull out the expertise."

Such is the life of a young architect on the rise. In a week's time, Gang will solve the stone problem; check the status of the Chinatown construction; fly to Hoboken, N.J., where she is one of 10 finalists vying to create a memorial honoring the 53 townspeople who died on Sept. 11; work through the night on a three-day competition to redevelop a vacant Chicago church; jet off to Aspen to confer with a client on the interior design of a new house; then hurry back to Chicago to attend an Art Institute opening of an aerospace exhibit for which she designed the installation.

At 39, Jeanne Gang is way ahead of the curve in the career cycle of architects, most of whom, the conventional wisdom suggests, don't hit their stride or win widespread recognition until they're pushing 60.

Maybe it's because with architecture, everything takes so long. Work on Gang's stunning outdoor theater in Rockford, which she began designing in 1998, was completed just this year, drawing rave reviews. From the time an idea forms in her head to the moment people actually start using a building takes years.

That's why Gang gets her creative kicks in two phases: first, on paper, wrestling with the design and asking materials to do things they haven't done before; then collaborating with engineers and craft- workers to create a structure that combines beauty and innovation with functionality and efficiency.

"Jeanne has all the right stuff," says noted Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, one of her mentors. "She's thorough, tenacious and tough. She's interested in materials and technical issues and still makes beautiful things. That's very impressive, and it's very Chicago."

Growing up in Belvidere, Ill., Gang wanted to be a veterinarian, but the nuns at her Catholic school discouraged her and tried to steer her into a career they thought was better suited to a woman.

They had no idea.

Gang's father, Boone County civil engineer Jim Gang, often took his daughter with him as he inspected the bridges and roads he built and maintained. Gang learned to appreciate large structures and the materials that hold them together.

"My buildings are big and manly," she laughs. "But when you think about it, it makes much more sense for women to be architects." And without any prompting, she rattles off the reasons: 1) You have to be a good listener; 2) You have to be creative; 3) There's no heavy lifting.

Gang enrolled at the University of Illinois to study structural engineering but eventually settled on architecture. She spent a year at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technical Studies in Zurich, then went to Harvard for graduate school, completing a master's degree in architecture in 1993.

After Harvard, she went to work for renowned architect Rem Koolhaas in The Netherlands. "He was teaching at Harvard at the time, and he's one of those super busy people you can't just call on the phone, so I found out where he was going to be, trapped him in an elevator and asked him for a job."

With Koolhaas, Gang learned the European approach to architecture, in which a designer collaborates with the client, the engineers and the craftworkers to solve problems and see a building through to completion.