Much arch-world attention has focused recently on the femininity of Jeanne Gang and Studio Gang Architects’ Aqua, completed several months ago in Chicago’s Lakeshore East neighborhood. The 82-story multi-use skyscraper was the fifth-tallest edifice built worldwide in 2009, and is allegedly the tallest building in the United States designed by an architecture firm headed by a woman. This latter assertion, by default, invites debate over whether the design is influenced significantly — or at all — by the designer’s gender. As stereotypes go, organic and curving lines are generally associated with feminine forms. Thus, the functional undulating balconies are quoted as having “a feminine touch” by the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Hawthorne.
It seems, however, that the wave-like shapes enveloping Aqua are more evocative of the waters in nearby Lake Michigan than of any female convention. In Hawthorne’s defense, it’s plausible that he settled upon his comparison based upon the historically hard-edged and “masculine” skyline that Chicago possesses. Belying that long-held impression, however, is one of Chicago’s most iconic contemporary landmarks, Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavillion, which contains the very same curvaceous elements that are considered by some to be feminine in Aqua. Obviously, the structures’ proportions are starkly different, but the repetitive undulating lines strike a similar chord.
More immediately relevant than any dialogue over gender distinction, however, is the fact that Aqua’s exterior curvatures function as balconies of varying sizes for the hotel rooms, condo units and apartments within the building. In other words, as with other projects by Studio Gang Architects (such as the South Pond of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo), function drives every element of the design.
For all the stylistic moxie and apparent functionality the building exudes upon first glance, though, Aqua’s interior spaces are incongruous with the building’s striking exterior. Held up against the public face of the building, the interior layout appears rather ordinary, and fails to utilize space in any unique manner. With the noteworthy exception of the aforementioned balconies, it seems you’d have no trouble finding similar living quarters in any number of new urban high-rises across the country. Not surprisingly, then, the question of whether femininity can be intrinsic in design becomes moot upon examining the interior, as the space is essentially devoid of any particular design fingerprints. The source of this interior/exterior discord is easily identified: Loewenberg Associates, a firm that specializes in such urban high-rise residential projects, designed the building’s internal spaces, while Studio Gang took the reins for the building’s exterior.
