If you crave a pleasant architectural shock, head to the eastern edge of downtown Chicago and look up. There you’ll find a skyscraper taking shape with projecting white balconies that curve in and out, startling in their irregularity. They ripple over the building’s blue-green glass walls like a wave in motion, bringing the sensual style of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi to sober, right-angled Chicago.
The skyscraper is called Aqua (at left), and when it is completed in early 2010, it will soar to a height of 82 stories — an exuberant exception to the banal cracker boxes around it. It took daring to pull off something like this, which is one of the adjectives people use to describe the skyscraper’s architect, Jeanne Gang. Among the others: striking, visionary, pragmatic and ambitious.
Just 44 years old, which is young in a profession where practitioners often don’t hit their stride until 60, Gang is one of the rising stars who have put new kick in Chicago’s architectural tank after a decade of low-octane performance. Aqua, much hyped as one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers designed by a female-headed firm, marks her leap from medium- to large-scale work. She is making a geographic leap, too, having just landed a major international commission — a 1.25-million-square-foot residential complex of towers and town homes in the big southern India city of Hyderabad.