Jeanne Gang

Jeanne Gang, an American architect, was born on March 19, 1964. She founded and serves as the principal of Studio Gang, an architecture and urban design firm with locations in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Jean Gang stands noteworthy as one of the few female architects to have won significant mandates in a field dominated by men.

The 82-story residential skyscraper Acqua in downtown Chicago and the 93-story Vista Tower, both in Chicago, are the two tallest buildings in the world that were built by women. Gang received her first significant recognition for the Aqua Tower. Both buildings have inventive facades that substitute syncopated patterns of undulating or irregular shapes for the conventional right-angled grid (as do Gang's other designs, such her design for a dormitory at the University of Chicago).

Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago's Waterways (2011), which envisions a greener future for the Chicago River, and Reveal (2011), the first publication on the work and process of the Studio, are the two books that Gang has written. In 2012, she collaborated on the publication of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects.

Date of birth: March 19, 1964

Accomplishments: Aqua, St. Regis Chicago, WMS Boathouse at Clark Park, 40 Tenth Avenue, One Hundred

Awards: 2017 Louis I. Kahn Memorial Award (Philadelphia Center for Architecture), 2013 National Design Award (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), 2011 MacArthur Fellow