The dissipation of the winds even allowed Gang to put balconies all the way up to the 82 nd floor (the top of her building), while most residential towers do not have outdoor spaces above sixty or seventy floors. The rippled surface of Aqua breaks up the wind so much that the building did not require a tuned mass damper - a device weighing hundreds of tons that engineers typically place at the top of tall buildings to stabilize them against the vibrations and sway caused by wind. Clad in a series of thin, concrete balconies, each of which was individually cast in a slightly varied curve using a reusable, flexible metal edge, the enlivened surface of the building toys with light, shadow and reflection, all the while belying its multiple functions: to facilitate social interaction between neighbors, to allow sunlight to reach different parts of the building while shading others, and to provide each balcony with a different view of the surrounding landmarks, including the Bean, Millennium Park and Lake Michigan, as noted in Gang’s early sketch.ĭrawing, Aqua Tower, Chicago, Illinois, USA: Early Concept for Mobile Privacy Screens on Terraces, September 2007 Architect: Studio Gang (United States) pen and black ink, graphite, color pencil over photocopy, two joined sheets of white paper Gift of Studio Gang Architects ĭescribed by Gang as “topography on the outside of a building,” the balconies serve yet another important function: to protect the tower from the force of the wind, one of the most difficult aspects of skyscraper engineering and an especial challenge in the Windy City of Chicago. Aqua’s underlying form, a straight-sided rectangle, is a relatively simple counterpoint to its complex exterior. Studio Gang reinterpreted the concept of topographic levels when designing Aqua the tower was imagined as a vertical landscape of hills, valleys and pools realized in cost-effective materials: concrete and glass. Cooper Hewitt owns a number of early drawings by Gang and her team for the building. The key aspects of Gang’s LEED certified design, which explores the dialogue between nature, architecture and social space and goes far beyond the obviously pleasing aesthetics of a rippling concrete and glass façade, were born in preparatory sketches like this early pencil-on-graph-paper study of the site’s topography. This is a city.Though it is frequently lauded as the tallest skyscraper designed by a woman in the world, Chicago’s Aqua Tower is worthy of praise beyond the gender of its architect, Jeanne Gang, a MacArthur fellow and winner of the 2013 National Design Award in Architecture. Let's not pretend you are in a single-family house. "Our studio is interested in how architecture can build stronger communities, stronger relationships. This breaks down the old relationship between the high apartment and the distant skyline. "It was about letting people connect to the outside and connect to their neighbours in an interesting way," Gang says. From a distance, this produces a beautiful visual effect from the balconies themselves, people can look above and below to see their neighbours on their own balconies. At Chicago's Aqua Tower, completed in 2009, Gang wrapped a 250-metre rectangular tower with balconies that appear to ripple: the edges of the protruding balcony slabs are curved, and they bulge in different places on different floors. Studio Gang's work so far suggests a few ways to change things up. “In a building like that, a lot is structure and a lot is math” – physics and economics, in other words – “and there’s this narrow band to make it interesting.” Where other elite architects avoid the many difficulties of housing, “I like the challenge of it,” Gang says.
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