Jeanne Gang: Building A Wilder City

By Caroline Winter

Studio Gang Architects—run by Jeanne Gang, 48, and her husband, Mark Schendel—moved into the gritty Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park in 2002. Initially, they shared their floor, above an Aldo shoe store, with a personal injury lawyer, a communist bookstore, and a poetry group. As these neighbors moved on and Gang’s reputation grew—she won a MacArthur Fellow “genius” grant in 2011—Studio Gang took over. Inside, research specimens line several of the orderly studio’s walls and windowsills: mushrooms, rocks, bent baseball cards, and various samples of wood. “A lot of the stuff we do involves testing materials or making big, giant mock-ups,” says Gang, who is slim with light gray eyes, a wavy chestnut bob, and an uninhibited laugh. “There’s a lot of craftsmen out here, people who fabricate things for us. It’s almost like a whole ecology.”

Among Gang’s intentions is to invite a “more wild version” of nature into cities, using what she refers to as “green infrastructure” to support and enhance urban landscapes. “Nature as we see it in cities is created, it’s man-made, it’s redesigned in a certain sense,” says Gang. “I think it’s important not for romantic reasons, but for practical and experiential reasons, to extend biodiversity within the ecosystem.”

This fall, Chicago broke ground on Gang’s biggest designed wilderness to date: Northerly Island. The plan, devised by Gang in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm SmithGroupJJR, fashions a public park out of Meigs Field, a former airport on a 91-acre man-made peninsula just off the southern tip of downtown Chicago. READ MORE >>

via www.businessweek.com