Chicago, IL: Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower

(Satellite)

The Aqua Tower is the wavy building. I think the blue towers to the right are her St. Regis building.

Illinois Field Guide posted

Aqua Tower rises 82 stories above Chicago's Lakeshore East neighborhood, and when it was completed in 2010, it became the tallest building in the world designed by a woman, a title Chicago architect Jeanne Gang held onto until her own follow up project, the St. Regis Chicago, eventually surpassed it just blocks away.

Gang got the job in an unusual way for a project this size. Veteran Chicago developer Jim Loewenberg met her in 2004, at a point when her tallest completed independent work was a 90 foot theater in Rockford, Illinois. He was looking for a young architect willing to break from the standard glass box formula for a tower going up at Lakeshore East, a site boxed in by a crowded field of existing high rises. Gang and her team responded with an idea nobody else in Chicago's skyline was doing at the time, stretching each floor's balconies outward at different lengths, anywhere from two to twelve feet, specifically to open up sightlines toward Lake Michigan and Millennium Park that a typical rectangular tower would have blocked entirely.

The result is the building's signature feature, a rippling, wave-like facade made of contoured concrete balconies jutting out from a rectangular glass core, with every single floor plate shaped slightly differently from the ones above and below it. Gang drew the inspiration directly from the layered limestone outcroppings found along the Great Lakes shoreline, translating that natural topography into poured concrete on a scale nobody had attempted downtown before. The design wasn't just visual either. Those irregular balcony shapes also help break up Chicago's notoriously harsh lake winds and provide shading, doing real structural work rather than existing purely for the sake of appearance.

At 819 feet [1318m] tall, Aqua combines residential apartments, condominiums, a hotel, offices, and parking into one 1.9 million square foot vertical community, all sitting on top of an eight story base topped by a massive terrace complete with gardens, a running track, and a fire pit. It remains one of the largest projects ever awarded to an American architecture firm led by a woman, and it launched Gang and her firm, Studio Gang, into the center of Chicago's architectural conversation almost overnight.

Aqua has stayed one of the most photographed and talked about buildings on the skyline in the years since, recognized by critics and architecture publications as one of the standout skyscrapers built anywhere in the world during the 2010s. For a city that already claims some of the most influential architecture in American history, Aqua gave Chicago something genuinely new, proof that even in a skyline shaped for a century by rigid steel and glass towers, there was still room for something that moved like water instead.