Studio Gang: Behind the Curtain (DigitAll)

In Chicago, America’s greatest architecture city, Studio Gang is using technology to reinvent the process of building (link)

“When we started thinking about this idea, we realized we were going to need a laser cutter,” architect Jeanne Gang says, standing over the machine in the back workshop of her architecture studio in Chicago. It’s an Epilog Legend 36EXT-- about the size of an old Hi-Fi-- and Gang and the laser cutter’s operator, a young architect named Schuyler Smith, are taking obvious delight in its mechanical purrings. On this spring morning, it’s cutting through a thin piece of Plexiglas, which will form part of a model of Aqua, a new 82-story apartment tower that Gang is designing for a site just east of the Loop, in downtown Chicago. The project required a laser cutter because each of its eighty-two floors is different—all vaguely rectangular, yet slightly variegated in shape, like a cloud or a human profile. The trusty Epilog stamps out cardboard scale-models of each floor plate as easily as a printer drawing shapes on a page. Stacked up on the table, they look more like a deck of cards than the future of architecture.

But indeed, Gang is at the vanguard of a new generation of architects using technology to reimagine--again--what architecture can be. Their sophisticated understanding of fabrication processes--not to mention their eagerness to experiment and a wild creativity--frees them from the conventions and economies of scale that bog down most building. “It’s just the way we think,” Gang, 42, says. “We look at the tools we have available and let them spark our imagination.” Focusing on how things are made means that “different” need not mean “expensive,” opening the door to speculative apartment buildings, low-budget community centers, and public park pavilions that are dignified and dramatic--not just something to keep out the rain. Just as Frank Gehry borrowed from aviation design to imagine new forms and to find ways of building them, Gang and her firm, Studio Gang, are melding digital tools, new methods of construction, and a sophisticated logic of sustainability to create buildings of startling humanity and variety.

Intended to be the centerpiece of Lakeshore East--the redevelopment of the old Illinois Central rail yards into a residential neighborhood with more than 5,000 apartment units--the Aqua Tower will be constructed using the architectural equivalent of mass-customization. “You don’t have a lot to work with on a building of this type,” Gang says. “But because the building is so long, you can develop something over the height of it by varying the floor plates.” Each floor of Aqua begins with the same rectangular shape but then oozes out to form open-air balconies that reach a maximum of twelve feet from the edge of the building. The little variations combine to create an image over the whole, not unlike when sports fans do the “wave” in a stadium, or individual pixels form a computer image. The building’s biggest bulges are positioned to take advantage of particular views, for example, toward Frank Gehry’s BP Bridge in nearby Millennium Park.

However, unlike those sculpted Gehry creations, Gang is working strictly within a set of constraints to minimize both cost and environmental impact. The laser cutter makes models cheaply and quickly, allowing the architects to work iteratively, even with variable shapes. Since it cuts directly from CAD files, the interpretative step (and most of the x-acto work) of traditional model-making is eliminated.

The actual building construction works in the same way. Using what’s known as “Building Information Modeling,” the unique shape of each of Aqua’s concrete floor slabs will be staked out by construction workers via GPS, directly from the project’s CAD files. Rather than extrapolating from drawings at the construction site, they’ll hook their tools directly into the computer files, as if they were “printing” the building itself.

Gang isn’t the first architect to use this methodology--BIM is also being used to build the World Trade Center’s new Freedom Tower, for example--but she’s undoubtedly extending its creative possibilities. Her habit of getting back to first principles owes something to Rem Koolhaas, at whose firm, OMA, both she and Mark Schendel, her life partner and a Studio Gang principal, worked for several years in the early 1990s. There, they learned that nothing can be assumed: structure, materials, even the building program have the potential to become starting points for invention.

Aqua, for example, owes something to “Marble Curtain,” an experimental installation designed for the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Working closely with engineers, Gang conceived of a suspended “curtain” of translucent marble, revealing a hidden structural ability in an ancient material. Yet the fact that it required 622 uniquely cut tiles of marble would have rendered it impracticable, if it weren’t for a computer controlled water-jet cutter that made short work of the task. The lesson was clear: computer-aided design can become literal, rather than merely representational—breaking with millennia of architectural tradition.

Gang approaches all building materials with a similar disregard for convention. “Our ideas are developed through material, rather than being about material,” she explains. For Studio Gang’s winning competition entry for the Ford/Calumet Environmental Center, located in an old industrial area on Chicago’s southern edge, Gang and her colleagues proposed recycling steel that was originally forged in Calumet’s mills to create a building that physically embodies its mission of environmental education. Gang says she got the idea while reading an obscure German book on animal architecture. “I woke up in the middle of the night and said, ‘we’ve got to make the building out of stuff that’s already there!’”--like a bird building a nest.

Taking another step back into the materials supply chain, Gang discovered Steel Spider, an online trading platform for new and excess steel. When the time comes to build (legal hurdles for the land itself remain), construction will begin by bundling recycled steel beams and pipes into nestlike supports. And since each mill customarily welds its name into the steel, visitors will be able to see where it comes from. The building will be positioned to take advantage of the sun’s warmth and cooling breezes, but its deeper lesson in sustainability arises out from its materials. “Nest making” becomes a metaphor for reuse.

It’s not surprising then that in Studio Gang’s offices in a low brick building in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, “detective style” glass doors from the previous tenant, a legal aid office, are reinstalled as a continuous wall. Propping open the door is a hefty piece of slag--a by-product of steel production, which is literally composed of the impurities that boil off during smelting. (At Calumet, the same material will be embedded in the terrazzo flooring.) And on one wall, coat hooks are stuck into a world map etched into wood by the office laser cutter. It’s a long way from the sleek minimalism typical of design today.

As if to prove the point, Gang pilots her beat-up Honda Insight hybrid car toward the Chinese American Service League community center that she designed in Chicago’s Chinatown. Completed in 2004, the 38,000-square-foot building houses adult and children’s day care, classrooms, counseling offices, and a kitchen to train recent immigrants for restaurant work. Two lions, a gift to the CASL from the People’s Republic of China, guard the entryway. Above them, and wrapping around the upper stories of the rectangular building, are diamond-shaped titanium tiles, whose luminescence shifts with the passing clouds-- distinguishing this as a public building amid the modest brick apartments that surround it. Not that the building’s $5.8 million construction budget allowed for titanium. Arthur Wong, a local businessman and owner of a nearby titanium powder factory, donated the necessary funds. Now he brings clients by the building to demonstrate what titanium is. Like the stone of an old courthouse, the material transforms the building into a monument. For Gang, it represents one more place to extract some competitive advantage from the supply chain. “A lot of it is about getting people hooked in, so they really want to do it,” she says.