A tipping point isn’t something you’d normally want to associate with a skyscraper, but that may be what Jeanne Gang’s Aqua, an 82-story residential project at Columbus Drive and Lake, turns out to be. For almost a decade megatowers have been rising downtown like weeds, and the developers have been using classic skyline views to market what in every other respect is mediocrity on a grotesque scale. They’ve clearly decided that if you provide popular locations and floor plans and kitchens that are “works of art,” the quality of the architecture won’t matter to buyers.
Gang has a reputation for projects that are bold yet pragmatic, such as Rock Valley College’s Starlight Theatre, where the roof opens up like petals of a flower to reveal the night sky. But Aqua ups the ante big-time. The $300 million building, scheduled to be completed in 2009, is the largest project ever awarded to an American firm headed by a woman. What’s more, it’s a sign that a new generation of Chicago architects is coming into its own.
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Gang and members of her firm, Studio/Gang/Architects, started by rethinking the idea of a tall building. “It must be in every inch a proud and soaring thing” is how Louis Sullivan described the skyscraper in the 1890s. The elegant glass boxes Ludwig Mies van der Rohe began building in 1949 refined that idea as they redefined modernism, but they were followed by innumerable bad imitations. By the 80s postmodernist architects seemed almost ashamed of any hint of soaring pride and tried to conceal the verticality of their towers with horizontal bands and neoclassical ornament, which was about as effective as dressing an elephant in a tutu.
More important was the perspective from inside the building. Developers want views, and Gang intended to offer as many compelling ones as possible. “Views are easy to get from the top,” she says. “But from the lower and middle floors you look between this dense forest of high-rises.” The Studio/Gang team constructed a supersize model of that dense forest, then used lengths of string to plot the endpoints of the views from Aqua’s units. Gang discovered that by adding terraces that swept in and out along the perimeter of the tower, she could create views that wouldn’t exist in a rectangular building. Where one terrace bumped outward you suddenly could see Millennium Park’s Bean pop out past the edge of the Aon Center. Other terraces created views of Michigan Avenue, the lake, or Frank Gehry’s winding BP bridge. Aqua, says Gang, “starts with these really strong connections to the different points of view in the city.” And 80 percent of the units–some part of a hotel, the rest rental apartments or condos–will have terraces.
The Studio/Gang team proved they could be acutely attuned to the science of creating a high-rise megaproject that fit the budgets and marketing needs of the developers. “This is how fine-tuned they are as an apartment-development machine,” says Gang. “They needed two more inches so that you could get that nightstand and that nightstand on this bed wall. We had to increase our building two inches.”
That caveat aside, there clearly is a new global spirit in architecture, and its watchwords are freedom and spontaneity. Of course it’s hubris to think you can make a building spontaneous–the laws of physics are unforgiving. But the appearance of spontaneity is possible. In the ideal world of Cecil Balmond, the engineering genius behind the work of cutting-edge architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Alvaro Siza, everything is in flux. A floor folds to become a wall, twists to form a supporting column, then folds again to become a ceiling. Structure is a single restless organism.
Gang proposed putting curtains on the terraces, made of a plasticized material that’s usually used to cover scaffolding and is available in different bright hues. “The marketing people didn’t like it,” she says. “They said it blocked the view. But you could really just minimize it–you can pull ’em back. The inspiration was making these terraces more livable throughout the year. You block the wind, but you also increase privacy. And during bird migration you could pull it and protect the glass from bird strikes–or birds from glass strikes.” It’s not hard to understand the marketers’ concerns–the concept is probably a little too anarchic for a $300 million building. But it’s still a kick imagining a bleak winter day rescued by a Mondrian-like blaze of color across Aqua’s facade.
