Jeanne Gang, the Anti-Zaha

Not recently named to the British order, but perhaps well on her way to starchitecture is Jeanne Gang, the architect behind Chicago’s Aqua skyscraper, the world’s tallest building yet designed by a woman. The New Yorker‘s Paul Goldberger, who we’ll always welcome here to Chicago, files this great profile on Gang, who he describes as something of the exact opposite of starchitects in general, including the most famous female of the group, Zaha Hadid. “Hadid,” he writes, “is a brilliant shaper of form, but her buildings are nothing if not arbitrary, and the combination of her fame and her flamboyant designs has insidiously led people to assume that female architects tend to favor shape-making over problem-solving.”