Jeanne Gang: Understanding the Power of Architecture

TRANSCRIPT

Jeanne Gang: Every place I go for architecture, I always go birding. It’s about place, and this is one of the ways I connect to a place. Even in Paris, even in Rome, you would not believe how much variety there is out there in the world in birds.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life. Before we get started, a little programming note.

Don’t forget that our first ever print issue of The Grand Tourist is now available for order online at thegrandtourist.net. It’s 364 pages, printed beautifully in Belgium with a linen-wrapped hardcover and three cover options, and contains stories from around the world with incredible photography from Seoul to Los Angeles to Tunisia and Berlin. Again, you can order it online now at thegrandtourist.net.

My guest today is a real well-influencer in the world of architecture. While I’ve interviewed her in the past and have known her work for years, it was only last year when she seemed to break through to the public consciousness. CBS Sunday Morning called her arguably the most important woman architect anywhere after the completion of her expansion of New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

To me, she’s held this title for quite some time already. Why? She has every virtue a great architect needs, an aggressive vision, a can-do attitude, technical curiosity, and a passion for things outside of just design, Jeanne Gang.

She’s based in Chicago and is an American Midwesterner through and through, and it clearly informs her life and practice. More on that later. She studied abroad in France as a student and cut her teeth working for Rem Koolhaas at the famed OMA before setting out on her own quite early.

In the design world, she might be best known for the Aqua Tower in Chicago, which was a forward-looking creation that really made a statement and was even the tallest female-designed building in the world, a title that was only overturned when she built another one, the St. Regis Chicago, years later. Time and time again, however, Gang is not known for her simply big and beautiful things. Instead, she’s known for using nature and the environment to shape her projects, often innovating in new and refreshing ways.

I caught up with Jeanne Gang from her headquarters in Chicago to talk about how the great American road trip inspired her as a young girl, what she learned from studying traditional architecture in Paris, her love of birding, what actionable idealism is, and much more. 

I kind of wanted to start at the beginning because I’ve met you before and I’ve written stories with you before, but I don’t know much about your early life. So I read about, you grew up in Illinois and you had three sisters and I believe your dad was an engineer and that he would take you on road trips to see things like bridges and things like that and really great kind of like American things to see out in the road. Tell me about those experiences.

Because he was a civil engineer who designed roads and bridges, road trips were kind of our summer vacations across the whole American 50 states. There was always a goal that he had to see some special bridge, so that was kind of the organizing theme of the vacations.

It was very American in that sense. No trains, of course, and always in the car. What I discovered during that time was the American landscape. I have a passion for landscape and there was so much variety that I discovered during those trips.

How often would you do them? Was it like summer?

Just during summer vacation. I would always be the one collecting rocks, with my suitcase becoming too heavy to lift back into the car by the end of the trip. That was kind of my first introduction to let’s say construction, structures. They were very exciting, but the living part of the landscape was really exciting to me too.

And I also read that your mom was a librarian, was kind of involved, things like Girl Scouts and things like that that had like an impact on you. It sounds like a very kind of can-do practical upbringing.

Yes, the other thing about her was that she was very like civic-minded and also very into the environmental movement at the time. That exposure was embedded in me, and a love of books, literature, and the written word were imbued by my mom. 

I really liked learning things about the wilderness and the great outdoors. That led to me doing a lot of things like building tree houses. I know it sounds very American suburb.

I actually grew up in a very small town, but there was a lot of conservation areas around and I had a nature guru from whom I learned about many things. This gave me a grounded sense of the relationships of all these different natural elements to human built-structures and also animal built-structures.

And if we could kind of go back and visit sort of you as a 16 year old young woman, like how would you describe that girl that we meet? Who were you back then?

I think I’m kind of the same. I didn’t really play with very girl-type things. I didn’t do dolls or that kind of thing. I was just a naturalist, a born naturalist, but always thinking of making things. I was very driven to make things then, similar to now.

I really like to work with the teams and work on projects. I also like to still connect the dots of what we do as architects and how we can make change. That involves people, and it involves rallying people around ideas and around beauty and working towards the goal, which is still the way that I operate in the world. More sophisticated, hopefully.

What made you want to study architecture? How did that sort of journey begin? Well, is it always something you wanted to do or someone kind of like suggested it?

I was leaning toward an art profession or career and just art making. Being from the Midwest, and also this family of an engineer and librarian, it just didn’t seem like something you could pursue as a lifetime activity in my head. I don’t think I knew anyone doing that.

I loved art and went to all the museums as a kid, so I was thinking maybe I could do engineering. I was very good in math and physics and everything. But then I found out that architecture was a little bit of a blend of the two. I found that out early and just went with it and have not looked back. 

I got lucky because I found something I loved very early and didn’t get on a detour or anything like that. I’ve just been an architect my whole life, practically.

And like when you, during your time in school, I read that you studied in Paris and places like Versailles and I can only imagine sort of like being that sort of naturalist girl, really outdoorsy from Illinois, like going to Paris, like for an undergrad must be like the most out-of-body experience or a fish-out-of-water experience possible. What was, why study in France at the time and what happened?

That’s such an interesting question because I was studying architecture and the history of architecture. We had a chance to do this study abroad, almost like an exchange for a year, which I signed up for, but I hadn’t really done that much travel outside the US at that point still. This was something new and exciting, I was always curious about everything, so I wanted to go. 

I loved a couple of things about it. One is that architecture is so important for expressing what a culture is about. It is really the hopes and dreams of any community and culture. You can see that in the way that Paris is made. Of course, there’s lots of different things in Paris. It’s very organic when you think about what it’s made out of. The limestone, the calcaire, comes directly from below the ground. It’s almost like they just dug everything out from below the ground and put it on top. It’s so incredibly connected with its environment in that sense.

I was really interested in the natural history museums there. There was an interesting approach to design for landscape, which was very formal, which I wasn’t so used to as many of the U.S. parks are more in the tradition of the English garden. Seeing the formalized nature was very interesting to me. It was new to see something like that. 

I’m not a landscape architect, but I love working with both the architecture on the site, working with landscape architects, trying to make habitats that are much more rich for the animals, and trying to do that in the city, but all at the same time as making the landscape and the building legible and understandable. That’s an interesting combination that maybe was produced out of that.

I would also say one more thing, which is that I really love Gothic architecture. At the time when I was studying there, everyone was into villas and Renaissance, which I also loved studying, but there’s something about Gothic and its emotive qualities and its soaring structure. To this day, I think I prefer it over Renaissance, I would say.

Hmm, and have you used any of that sort of love of Gothic architecture in your own work in some way?

My work and our work, it’s in terms of wonder and emotion, so hopefully we capture some of that.

And so when you graduated, what was your sort of first experience like? Because I know you bounced before starting your own firm, you worked in a few others before you started your own in the late 90s, right? So what were those first kind of couple of jobs like?

I still needed to, as we all do, intern for an architect. I thought I’ll use this as a chance to go back to Europe and work for someone that I like and that I admire. I ended up working with OMA and Rem Koolhaas.

My experience there was great because it was a pretty small office at the time. I had a lot of responsibility and a lot of connection with Rem. The projects I worked on were really interesting. The Lille Grand Palais, which was in Lille, and then the house in Bordeaux. Both of those projects were really exciting, especially before deciding to come back ready to start my own thing.

And what was working with Rem like back in the day?

He’s professorial in a certain way, but also a demanding boss, I would say. But also very intellectual and really willing to give people a chance to do their best and to shine. 

I really liked that I was able to work both on a project that was in construction and one that was in the conceptual phase. In Lille, I was already in the design development stage and also on site, whereas the house was more in the beginning concept phase. 

And, you know, starting, when you started your career on your own, with your own firm, you know, Chicago kind of was like the center of your career more or less for those first 10 years or so. Was the, just as like a, as a, just to ask, like the McCormick-Tribune Welcome Center, did you work on that with Rem at first? Because I just, or give me the story on that as sort of like one of your earliest projects.

It was a project that OMA won with IIT. I entered an unofficial, uninvited version of that competition and submitted it to IIT, which was a pretty big effort. It was an official competition and they didn’t allow it to be entered, but it did show that I had thought, and my young firm had thought, about the issues about that project and it went quite well. 

There was a local architect, there was the design architect OMA, there was a builder, there was a project manager, and the client. Where we came into the story was when there were some difficulties of moving the project forward and hitting the budget, so tensions were rising. That’s when they called to see if we would be able to come in as a liaison. I think it would have been just OMA architects that would have been on site if they could have done it, but nobody wanted to move to Chicago. So, there was a role for us.

I was not really wanting to play that role because I was starting my own practice and getting it going. I also had to have a team working and it seemed like a good opportunity, but I was very cautious about us putting all of our time into that project. I wanted it to be good and I wanted to help, but I also was starting my own practice. So that’s the backstory.

Yeah, there was also that connection to you having worked there at some point and having that kind of connection, I’m sure it made it a little bit awkward for you at the time where you kind of wanted to stand on your own, right?

My partner that led that project, Mark Schendel, also had worked at OMA. He’s more of an operations person, so that project was cut out for someone like him.

And, you know, when you started out, why Chicago? How did it all kind of start there? Like, did you ever think like, oh, I should move to New York or LA or something?

I always wanted to live in New York. I really thought about it, but at the time I had to consider multiple factors. One of them was a family issue. My dad was sick and I wanted to come back to Chicago.

Chicago is also one of the best architecture cities in the world. I was excited about being part of that. I also wanted to work at a larger scale. When you’re young and trying to decide these things, the reasons don’t always make sense when you look back. But they’re what you’re working with at the time. I was thinking this would be a better chance to build at a larger scale, and that actually happened. 

I was also thinking that it’s a city that is on the cutting edge when it comes to sustainability. There was a lot of emphasis there. So those are the kinds of things I was thinking about.

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And for someone who doesn’t know Chicago as I think a lot of Americans do, you know, as a sort of treasure trove of architectural history, like how do you describe it to somebody who’s maybe never been, right?

The skyline, on a geologic level, almost looks like a mountain that is rising out of the prairie. It has this incredible silhouette from far away, but then you realize that it’s made up of pixels of all these incredible, individual buildings as you get inside it. 

The innovation required to build these tall buildings on what was essentially a swamp is an incredible engineering feat. What’s underneath them was where the innovation was. It’s not like in New York where you can just go down to rock immediately below the surface. It’s mushy down there. There was a lot of engineering that had to take place. 

I also think that the natural history of the Chicago region is so well articulated in Nature’s Metropolis, this famous book. It gives you a sense of the extraction and the coming together of the railroads that factored into making this metropolis. It’s so fascinating. You can see it everywhere in the city. Those were things that I really love about Chicago. 

Of course, being a birder, it is on the Mississippi Flyway too.

Tell me about that. You’re a birder. I mean, do you consider yourself a birder?

Oh yeah. 

So you go birdwatching is basically what that means.

Yes, it means that. It’s a phenomenal experience that happens twice a year, spring and fall, when there’s migration. You get incredible birds flying from all the way from the tip of South America, going all the way to North America and Canada. They pass right through the city. It’s an incredible thing.

And do you like go, do you go to like parks with, you know, birding groups and like try to do traditional birdwatching of like writing down the birds that you see and carrying them off the birds.

We use apps nowadays. You don’t have to write it down anymore.

Oh, okay. Actually, like the idea that’s just something romantic about the idea of, you know, a little journal that you’ve drawn like some sort of bird that you just saw with a little leather strap around it or something to keep it together. But I guess you’ve, so now we’re using apps, which is good to know. So you, so this is, has this been like a, do you actively sort of do this? Like as a passion?

Yes.

What was the most amazing bird you’ve seen recently?

Recently, the American woodcock. I went up to the north side of the city, where they like a certain kind of farm field, wetland kind of thing. During April, the males are doing this incredible performance to attract the ladies.

And like a little dance.

It was pretty cold, but we did see them. It was Woodcock o’clock, as we call it. It happens right around 7:30am. 

That’s so cool. Where’s, have you, have you traveled for birding? Have you like been to any sort of, do you do it locally?

Every place I go for architecture, I always go birding. It’s about place, and this is one of the ways I connect to a place. Even in Paris, even in Rome, you would not believe how much variety there is out there in the world and in birds. 

That’s amazing. 

It’s a nice, little benefit for me when I work in different places. And, yes, I also sometimes travel specifically for that too.

Oh, okay. Where’s that, where’s the coolest place you’ve ever been to for birding or, or been or have done it?

Probably the Pantanal in Brazil. We’re designing a US embassy in Brasilia. If you go straight West from there, you get to the Pantanal, which is an incredible landscape with jaguars and an amazing amount of birds.

That’s incredible. Well, back to Chicago for a second. The obviously like, you know, the Aqua Tower is going to be, you know, as a part of your CV forever. And it’s become so iconic and such a kind of like a watermark in the history of American architecture. Can you explain what the Aqua Tower is to those listening who maybe have never heard of it and how it came to be?

It’s an 82-story building in downtown Chicago. It has this site that isn’t the easiest to see. There are a lot of tall buildings right around it, just North of Millennium Park.

The developer came to me, and I think he wanted to work with someone different. There was, at that time, mostly tall buildings all done by corporations. He was a developer and an architect himself, named Jim Loewenberg. I met him at a dinner. He then invited me to come look at his project. I did not know it was going to be a tower.

I thought it would never get a chance to do a tower, frankly, because I had already started my own practice. But then, he said, “why don’t we give it a shot?” I said,” can I have some time for research?” Because I always start with research. And he goes, “well, how much do you want?” And I go, ”four weeks.” And he’s like, “I’ll give you one week.” So I came back and had two different schemes. One scheme was the one that became the Aqua Tower. It sparked his imagination. He knew how to build that. He wanted to go with that one. 

The idea of it is that every floor is different, but they’re slightly different slab edges, which are curvilinear. They add up to over 80 stories. You see waves and fluidity to it. We knew that we would be using concrete for that building because of how fluid it is and how you can use a flexible form work. I was thinking about how to build it while coming up with that design. 

I also knew that wind would be an issue. One of my first projects was for an exhibition about NASA wind tunnels. I was really familiar with how buildings behave under wind conditions. I was trying to use this variety to break up the wind so that you wouldn’t have this downwash that’s uncomfortable and could make it so people could go outside on their balcony.

There were buildings where people had balconies, but these were stacked like innies and like indentations in the building to make little outdoor balconies. With Aqua, the balconies are outboard and they’re moving all the way around the building. It was really based on my young staff and myself going, “what would we want to have if we ever got a chance to live in a tunnel building?” For me, being an outdoorsy person, I want to step outside. I don’t care if it’s cold. I just want to be able to have that connection instead of having it mediated through an 80-story elevator ride. So that was the impetus of it.

It was a big hit. And it wasn’t a super expensive building. It was a very simple idea and we got it done just in time before the economic crash. If it had started six months later, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. 

Oh, okay. And do you see it in the context of a sort of biophilic kind of design of this ideas of water and motion and kind of as part of that phenomenon or do you just sort of see that as just sort of like the name and how it kind of was communicated?

For me, the inspiration was these limestone outcrops that you get along the Great Lakes, which are formed by water and wind and time and erosion. That was what I took a cue from to get started. 

It’s not like some AI thing where you just say, “oh, make a building that looks like water.” The formal exploration was thinking through the limits of the formwork. The way I did it was by going every fifth floor, or something like that, and then transposing between the floors. We did try different softwares on it, but frankly, the curves were ugly coming out of the computer. So, it was more an artistic, handmade series of lines, then, of course, made digital.

It’s still very simple, thinking of hills and valleys in the overall form. The idea of it would be that when you have this variety and not straight stacked up balconies, you can not only get glimpses around corners of the building, but also of other people on their balconies. If it’s all stacked up straight, it’s very hard to see others.

It’s a very social building. It has turned into a building where a lot of people that are more extroverted live there. A lot of business school and grad students, but also young professionals and empty nesters that are coming in. It’s a cool building in that it’s not one of these buildings where people bought in to invest in it and then don’t live there. It’s fully lived in with this variety of types of people.

For me, it was a good entree into the things that I care about for tall buildings. It’s not just making some monument to yourself. It’s really inhabitable infrastructure.

Speaking of places people actually wanna live, I was in Chicago one day running around in a cab visiting some family for a trip and saw this incredible building. And I was like, oh, what is that? And I have to look it up. And then quickly on Google maps and kind of like triangulated what it was. And then of course it was Solstice on the Park was one of your projects.

Yeah.

Can you describe this project? And it used something called solar carving. And so it’s a sort of beautiful, very, very cool looking. I don’t even know how to say that. Sorry, I’m not an architect myself. It’s almost like 20 years of design media experience. And so that just looks really cool and almost sci-fi looking. And can you explain like what Solstice on the park is and what that whole concept of solar carving is? Like, what is that?

Well, there’s this cluster of taller-scale, bigger-scale buildings down in Hyde Park, which is not in the city center, but it’s where the University of Chicago is located. Obviously, your family must be somewhere near there that you were visiting. It’s also very close to where the new Obama Presidential Library is being built as we speak. 

This was a project with a developer on a site that faces north and south. It’s a building with narrower ends on the east and west and the longer expanse on the north and south, facing down toward the Library, the Museum of Science and Industry, and all this park.

So, the beautiful apartments that would be facing south have great views. We were asked by the client to give about 50% of them balconies, but not everything. He didn’t want to have balconies everywhere. I think it was maybe 40 or 50%. 

We started thinking about that and also that facing south, you’re going to get a lot of solar heat gain because we’re in the Northern Hemisphere. So, we angled the walls of the building in these kind of chunks of two and three-stories, but we used the angle of the solstice, where at springtime the sun is on an angle of incidence.

What that does is it self shades. When you’re in the winter, when you want solar exposure, the sun is lower and it can enter into all the apartments. But when in the summer, when the sun is high in the sky and you want to cut out that extra heat, this angle cuts off the solar exposure to the apartments.

For every two or three floors where we made this cut, the one at the bottom of that gets a bigger balcony. The one at the top of that cut gets more interior space. And then we just played a game of how to arrange these cuts in the facade.

It’s kind of like carving it related to the solar angles. Something that is, I think, really interesting. And we continue to work with that idea.

Sometimes we’re working with it so that we allow solar exposure to some other building that’s behind, like the solar carved building we did in New York City on the High Line. That was cut so that the light could get to the garden of the High Line, rather than blocking it out with the building. We’re working with Stanford right now on the Doerr School of Sustainability. With that one, we’re working with the building massing to allow light into other campus buildings and massing ours so that it’s being a good neighbor. You know what I mean?

I think it’s exciting to think about how sun angles could redefine zoning instead of just whatever the rules are about now, which is based on other things.

And after all of this work that you’ve done in terms of solar carving and being sensitive to the angles of the sun and all that, over time, do you feel like you’ve gotten, what have you learned about creating architecture this way? How is that?

It’s what I’ve learned, but it’s also our methodology. How do we work? We, Studio Gang, are like an organism that is intelligent and uses our research to inform new projects. The main concept is starting with what’s there. Where are you in the world? What is the climate? What is the site? Even on the social level, who are the different active organizations that are there? What are some assets, both civic assets and natural assets, that you can build on? It could even be cultural assets like historic buildings nearby or whatever it is. Start with what’s there before you act.

That’s the way I’ve always worked. I think that has a lot to do with my understanding of the natural world, probably. The way that a lot of other organisms function is that they are working with what’s already there. So, I do that as an architect and we do that as a firm.

We have a more organized approach to gathering that information and deploying it, or building on something that we did before, but taking it into a different direction based on the specifics of the project at hand.

And when it comes to the sort of high watermarks in your career, of course, the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History is another major milestone for you. And congrats again on that. Now that it’s been a little bit since its opening, tell me about how that came about and how you’re thinking about it now. Cause it’s a sort of like very, such an incredible space, especially for New York. And I’m not really sure why it’s so surprising for a New Yorker like me, but it’s like something that everyone is like dying to see because it just doesn’t feel like things we get in New York. Even though we have a lot of amazing architecture, we don’t have spaces like that sometimes.

I’m really excited about that project because it was unprecedented in New York to do something like that. What was so cool was that the faculty, I guess you call them faculty, the curators, and the scientists and researchers that we worked with at the museum, they’re so open-minded and they didn’t have a set thing in their mind. So we were able to bring new ideas to that. If it made sense, they liked it, they responded to it well, they wanted to do it. They were really passionate about that. 

Now that it’s been open a little while, I think what I really enjoy is seeing how people use it as public space and just hang out in there. That wasn’t really possible in the museum up until now: having a space that’s really dedicated to the public. It has this big stair in the atrium that people like to hang out on. We also brought the library out to be a space that you can visit. That space is always filled with people. It’s bringing natural light in, connecting to the park.

The architecture always looks different because of the way that it is shaped by the light that comes in through the atrium and onto these curved surfaces. It was really motivated by wanting to get people to make their own path and to discover the natural world, sciences, and spark their curiosity to follow what they’re interested in. 

A big part of the program is educational spaces, so schools come in. There are classrooms and there are also exhibits. They hopefully inspire the next generation of scientists and researchers. It’s really important, especially in times like now where science is not even believed by many people. There’s a drop in the level of achievement in science in our schools. We’re also flooded with so much false information. I think it’s really a critical time to orient our young people back towards what science is and how exciting it can be to discover something, to research something, to prove something.

It feels like an important project in that sense. But to get people in, there’s an emotional aspect to it. You come in and it feels amazing in that space and you want to be there. There are living insects in this part of the museum. There are butterflies. Beauty is something that inspires people to want to go deeper.

You could have those same programs for youth and such, and you could have it in a rectangular box or any other form, but it might not be as compelling to draw people in. That’s one of the superpowers of architecture.

And you’ve written and spoken about something called sort of actionable idealism before. And how is that sort of connected to this? If you can help explain that.

I think it’s important to, at the start of each project, realize what the power of that project is and what it has the potential to help shift and change toward a positive result. You can do that on your own, but you can do that with your client too. With the American Museum of Natural History, they were well aware of this issue about science in the United States. But you do that through doing.

You brought up doing in the beginning. Maybe something on paper is interesting and exciting, but if you can’t get it realized, it’s not going to be as impactful. Making steps towards actions, toward this ideal, is really still very important.

The reason I say that is the “why” of why we do what we do. We are idealistic, but we want to get there, even if sometimes it has to be smaller steps to get toward that future that we want.

And is that part of how you view architecture today? Maybe there’s not as much actionable sort of things that can actually get done that there’s too much on paper or too much discussion about things on paper and not enough doing.

I just want the architects to feel they have agency. Even if it’s something that seems relatively small, it can make a change that can build to something bigger. I started out doing a lot of community centers in all these different communities around Chicago—smaller projects, but each one with a question that’s trying to push on and advance. We have to think about it like that instead of comparing it to something much bigger or being someone that doesn’t want to build or compromise.

Sometimes you do have to compromise something, but maybe there’s something else that comes out of that that could be an advantage. That’s the actionable idealism mindset—to never give up and to just keep trying to find that issue that you can work toward.

And when it comes to action, there’s this need for housing in a lot of major cities across the world, London and New York, of course, and all across the USA, there’s sort of a housing shortage. When you hear this sort of talk out there in politics or just in the news or in architecture, where we talk about the need for housing, like what comes up in your mind as an architect, like a kind of a wishlist or like something that like pops into your head?

Right now, I’m thinking mostly about in buildings that we already have, what could become housing? How can you convert structures into housing that’s exciting and pleasant and interesting? And then going forward, if we get buildings that are maybe offices, how could you design it in a way that could be reversed into housing?

So, thinking of it upfront and because there is such a need, as you say, it might be even faster if we can think of ways to use buildings that are already there. It would save more carbon also.

And of all the projects you have sort of in planning stages at the moment, is there one that is the most challenging from a technical or engineering point of view?

The Doerr School of Sustainability is challenging because, on the architectural side, it’s a new home. It’s the first new school at Stanford  the last 70 years. They’re making it to address sustainability, so it will bring together earth sciences, biology, oceans, all kinds of different disciplines that have never been together before. It’s like a new home for them, so that’s really important as a challenge. 

But, how do you address sustainability for something that’s a sustainability school? It’s really forcing us to drill down and make decisions that we want to be replicable. It’s not just spending the most money on things, but asking what is the most appropriate thing to do and how can you get that to be such a leader in sustainability for that particular project? There’s a lot riding on it.

Yeah, it sounds like, they say doctors make the worst patients. So I can only imagine doing a school at a university about sustainability to study it and then to be under full public and academic review in every conceivable point of view and every conceivable angle. That sounds challenging unto itself.

And speaking of schools, you’re a frequent speaker, you’re also a teacher. What is the biggest lesson about being a successful architect in the 21st century that you think every young architect really needs to understand?

I think it has to do with this idea of addressing big issues, even through a small project. My last studio that I gave the students was adding capacity onto the New England Aquarium, which is an over 50-year-old concrete building, which also is on the Boston waterfront, which is subject to climate change. It’s already experiencing flooding in the area where they have the mechanical.

It’s a lot of problems at once, and also the issue of oceans that the aquarium is dealing with. How can the building, how can architecture, help to engage with the visitor about climate change, about the oceans, which is their focus, as well as be amazed by what they see in the exhibits, but get people to the pier? It’s on Central Wharf, which is subject to massive changes right now over the next number of years. It’s really loading.

The students have full exposure to the complete extents of the issues. Then, they need to navigate their way to develop positions, to develop questions that they want their work to address. I think my philosophy is to give them everything because it is going to be even more complex in the future, there will be more threats to the environment, but also still the need for experience.

I’d like to give it all and then help them navigate where they want to focus and how they make their hierarchy of how they’re addressing those things. All students, but also all practitioners, are going to have to start working in this way. It’s a lot, but they’re super interesting challenges.

And if there’s like one thing you wish just the general public or, I don’t know, people with power, like whether or not they’re billionaires or developers or someone on a zoning board or the Senator of Illinois, like whatever you would want to kind of sit them down and have them really understand about the power of architecture, what would you say?

I would say it’s not just architecture. It’s not just for humans. All living things are threatened right now. Bringing nature back into the city and making our buildings stop causing climate change, so making them better for the environment. Sometimes we forget, or we think of cities as divided from nature in a way, but because the whole planet is having these stresses, cities can be great places also for biodiversity.

I think that our buildings need to take that into account, use all their surfaces to support that, make it possible for people that are using these buildings to also enjoy the natural environment as well, including access to light and natural air and such. I think it’s really a message about how important it is right now to build well, to reuse buildings, to incorporate ideas about nature into the city.

Thank you to my guest, Jeanne Gang and to everyone at Studio Gang for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And you can purchase the first ever print issue of The Grand Tourist online on our website. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Till next time!

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