Studio Gang's "Actionable Idealism"
Jeanne Gang
Interviewed by Miriam Ho
Studio Gang makes aesthetically-striking, intellectually rigorous buildings and landscapes. An affinity with nature, an ostensible emphasis on wildness, runs through the meticulously designed civic buildings, urban landscapes, skyscrapers and temporary installations created by the 20-year-old Chicago-headquartered practice lead by architect and MacArthur fellow Jeanne Gang.
The monograph Studio Gang: Architecture, released by Phaidon in June 2020, probes the ideas that underly this way of ecological thinking. Drawing inspiration from both natural forms and ecological relationships, nature, for Studio Gang, is craft-based, resourceful, and networked, an approach to making design choices guided by systems-thinking and an impressive commitment to site-specific research. Tools and processes familiar to architectural practice are reinvented to tackle what Jeanne Gang has called "no lack of urgent problems to solve in the global work of architecture"(1)—indeed, design as creative-problem-solving is an ethical imperative for Studio Gang Architecture.
Prior to the monograph's release, Jeanne Gang and I spoke online in April 2020 to reflect on the office’s past and ongoing projects. In her soft-spoken Midwest accent, Jeanne Gang's indomitable enthusiasm for design and its capacity for social change came through vividly as our conversation drifted to empathy, social inequity and other looming current issues.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Miriam Ho [MH] | In the introduction to the monograph, Mohsen Mostafavi wrote about how your work is grounded in a fascination in nature. At what point did you begin turning to nature for inspiration?
Jeanne Gang [JG] I've been interested in nature my whole life. Growing up, I was fascinated with the way that things grow and with natural forms, I drew them and researched them and studied them. When I started my practice, I really began to be able to bring it together with the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, which was a competition project we won for an environmental research and education hub in a post-industrial, marshy region southeast of Chicago, a former steelmaking area. It was never built, but its design was about helping the site and surrounding community move forward by bringing together these different dimensions of nature—not only its form, but also its systems, the way that things work together and in ecological relationships.
That project incorporated different reclaimed materials, but it put them together in a way that involved rethinking how we specify architectural materials. Normally, material specification is a process of picking things out of a catalog, but here, in this project, we really looked at what was available and what was nearby. It was very much like a nest building process—using those things that are locally abundant and therefore have less embodied energy.
It was also a building that protected the wildlife around it, first by using screens made of recycled rebar and wood to prevent birds from striking the glass windows, and second with the building systems, which functioned 100% off-grid. This was a pivotal project for me in terms of understanding how architecture could function more symbiotically with nature. And since then, it's just been a constant study: the types of things that I read, the types of things that we do in our office. . . Working to discover how architecture can be part of the cycles of nature instead of working against them. Like Ford Calumet, it’s by starting with what's already there.
Ford Calumet Environmental Centre. Image © Studio Gang
The Ford Calumet Environmental Center is a 28,000-square-foot research and education building designed for the City of Chicago. The project won an international competition and was fully designed but never built. Located near a former steel-making site, it envisioned a way of building that uses local, abundant, and discarded materials: salvaged steel from the Calumet industrial region and other remnant, recyclable materials such as slag, glass bottles, bar stock, and rebar.
MH | You developed this close and analytical relationship to nature as a child. Did you grow up in a rural place?
JG | I grew up in a small town in Northern Illinois. It was close to major nature preserves, so I was very connected to nature. Today, when I'm not working in or visiting cities, I like to visit more wild places, to see how people and wildlife inhabit them. I’m also interested in how we can bring more wild nature into the city—so it’s not just grassy parks, but places where there is actual wildlife and more biodiversity.
MH | In what ways can we go beyond parks?
JG | One example from our work is the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo. It was a park in a traditional sense, a grassy landscape with a reflecting pool from the early 1900s. Our project brought this place into a more wild state of nature by excavating the concrete pool and deepening it into a pond, creating topography, planting new diverse vegetation—all to create a wetland habitat that would attract animals as well as people. Today it's an incredible place for learning about wildlife—more than 250 species have been observed on-site! Students really like to be there, there's a lot more to look at, more interesting things to see. It also doubles as stormwater infrastructure that gives the city more resilience against flooding and climate change because the site is absorbing rainwater and holding it in the pond.
Rivers and their banks are also important places where wild nature can be brought back into cities. In the past, rivers were primarily industrial conveyance infrastructure. Today that is no longer a major pressure, and we can convert riparian areas into places for people and wildlife and more biodiverse plantings. We’re currently doing that in Memphis, where we’re working along the entire Mississippi riverfront to transform it with biodiverse green spaces and structures for recreation and events. We’re drawing on a lot of local engagement and history—cultural and natural—to inform the design.
MH | Those are the sort of places that city dwellers gravitate towards when they're looking for a way to connect to nature.
Tom Lee Park, Memphis, Tennessee. Images ©Studio Gang and SCAPE
Tom Lee Park is a project that Studio Gang is currently designing in collaboration with SCAPE. The project will transform a 30-acre site along the Mississippi River into a signature waterfront park for Memphis, connected to a city-wide trail network and to civic and cultural institutions including the Cossitt Library and National Civil Rights Museum. The project’s design process engaged many stakeholders and community groups, including local high school students through Studio Gang’s Youth Design Leadership initiative launched in 2018.
JG | During this time of confinement, it's clearly more important than ever to have big, open natural spaces that are accessible locally, where people can have fresh air and enjoy the outdoors.
MH | Tell me more about the concept of “actionable idealism,” which you brought up in the mongraph.
JG | What we're seeing right now shows that things have to change, not just because of the coronavirus, but also because of the damage we're doing to the climate of our planet. Human and environmental health are connected, and we as architects have to think about how to use our skills to create design solutions that help steady the planet and reduce the negative impact of human culture on our environment. We see that, right now, there's just so much inequity within our societies and cities. Those are the biggest challenges, and they present themselves in different ways. Part of our practice has always been to try to find ways to use our design skills towards making a better place for everyone—that’s “actionable idealism.” We take action at different scales, from improving our personal design skills, to taking on pro-bono projects in our local communities, to pursuing ways that our projects can make a positive impact for all living things. We want to take on those challenges.
MH | You wrote about French sociologist Bruno Latour's vision of a planet where "all living beings are recognized as free and accordingly, they come together as free agents to create new societies." (2) How do you think we can shift our focus from a human society to one of all living things?
JG | In general, we’ve been so human-centric. When we build, we impact everything around us, so we first need to become more conscious of how our human constructions impact the other creatures and systems around them. There's an awareness and knowledge that has to be built up. One cause that’s very important to me is mitigating the negative impact of architecture on birds. Buildings with reflective glass can be very dangerous and disruptive to the habitats around them, but there are many bird-safe design strategies we can use that improve these outcomes and support avian life.
There’s also the aspect of what we choose to build, and for whom, meaning—how do we make sure that our designs are reaching and improving the lives of people from all backgrounds, not only the powerful ones we normally work for? We have to intentionally design our practices so that we can make a greater positive impact and work toward equity.
Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago. Photograph by Tom Harris. © Tom Harris Photography
The Nature Boardwalk at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo is a public park that transforms the zoo’s picturesque south pond, first built at the turn of the 19th century, into an ecological habitat for wildlife, including migrating species. By filtering and collecting rainwater, the park takes pressure off Chicago’s hard infrastructure. The boardwalk meanders through different ecological zones, providing an outdoor learning environment for urban residents and zoo visitors.
MH | Was that the case with the Polis Station project? Was the police your client?
JG | No, we didn't have a client for that project because we felt that we had to be able to come up with some proposals that understood both sides of the issue. It was self-initiated, generated out of concern for what was happening in the States at that time in 2015—the violence committed by police against community members. We wanted to see if there was something we could do as designers to address the situation, so we began to work with the community to envision how police stations, which are publicly-owned buildings, could be reframed to better serve their neighborhoods. How might stations become more like community centers? In a certain way, the project anticipates the current conversation around defunding the police in favor of investing in neighborhood services and amenities that support community safety, health, and economic mobility.
MH | How did you go about finding community groups that were interested in what a police station could do? I can’t help but wonder what the local attitude towards the police would be to start with.
JG | Good question. We decided to look at police stations in neighborhoods that were suffering from violence, but also neighborhoods that had a lot of potential, including a lot of youth and strong community groups. We reached out to neighbourhood groups that already existed, as well as the local alderman, and found additional community leaders and residents to speak to in that way. We posed the question: Would you like to talk about police-community relationships and what design could do to improve them? We did a lot of interviewing, so we had a sense that people had something to say, and we were able to find a lot of people that wanted to participate. It's interesting, because we found that when you make design the focus of the conversation, it eases some of the tensions around these issues, because a lot of people have opinions about design. We were able to engage in fruitful conversations about what a future police station could be like.
One of the ideas that arose in the community workshop sessions was, why not use the parking lot outside the police station for sports? Both the police and kids like sports, and this could be an opportunity to set up some interaction that's non-confrontational. We incorporated the idea into the project’s design proposal, and as a kind of “proof of concept,” we also went out and raised money to build a basketball court on the parking lot. It’s still there and has become a well-used space in the neighborhood, not just for sports but also for events.
Polis Station, Chicago. Images © Studio Gang
Polis Station was a self-initiated research project created by Studio Gang in 2015 that explored how design might play a role in building healthier police-community relationships. Through conversations with local residents and community groups, as well as police officers, the project proposed a series of physical and programmatic steps that could be taken to adapt existing police station buildings into sites of social connection with new neighborhood services and amenities.
MH | I’d like to touch on something you wrote in the article "Healing the Machine" for Harvard Design Magazine in 2015. You wrote that "in the global work of architecture there is no lack of urgent problems to solve. Each new disaster of climate or human conflict seems more critical than the last, and today's media makes the plight of faraway places immediate to empathetic designers." (3) This really resonates right now. Do you think empathy was always part of the practice of architecture?
JG| I think that design is at its core about empathy, but there are practices that do more to foreground it. Designers are empathetic, because we want to make something that people can use, and that they like. It’s always been there in any kind of design, not only architecture—if you're designing an electronic device, like a cell phone, you have to understand how people react to things, what they like and what they respond to.
It matters what you design. You’re a writer -- when writers use the same clichés you don't read their work anymore because it doesn't awaken your sensibilities. Architecture is the same: you have designs that are not reinterpreting anything that's advancing the discussion, or not articulating something new with the medium.
The important thing is tying together design with programs that are in need of solutions. There’s a strong tradition of architects who have worked to benefit society, but we also want to expand on that tradition by working much more closely with communities so that we can infuse the work to infuse the work with their knowledge and insights, to create projects that really lift the people who use them, that really resonate.
That's a word that is important for me: that the work resonates with the users and the place.
MH | We're so often struck by what is happening in other parts of the world and this desire to help, but I think you’re saying that empathy can also be about finding ways to reframe the narratives that we have.
JG | There are architects that are good at doing the same thing over and over, perfecting it, but I’ve always been more interested in how do we make a discovery that is newly relevant because of the current situation. Or, how do we rediscover something that has been lost, or push something further. That's what gets me super excited.
MH | So reinventing with materials and techniques, and looking for strategies to deal with current issues.
JG | If you look at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership that we built at Kalamazoo College in Michigan—there was never a need for this type of building before. It’s a new typology. It’s new that we even speak about social justice, that we are intentionally developing leaders in that field.
There was an old technique that was nearly lost, called wood masonry—using logs like bricks. Somehow that construction method and the Center’s mission reinforce each other, because this technique was used for a barn raising, where neighbors came together to help someone build their barn, but we're using it in a modern building, which is also about community, people coming together to make something to support each other.
The rest of the Kalamazoo College campus is built of brick masonry, usually in a faux-Georgian style. So Arcus with its wood masonry resonates with its surroundings, but it is much lower in embodied carbon than the brick buildings, because it uses trees that are dried out naturally rather than being fired in a kiln. It's elevating the technique to a new level of environmental awareness.
Arcus Center. Photography by Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing
The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership was built in 2014 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is an educational and cultural facility on the campus of Kalamazoo College that serves as a meeting space for students, faculty, visiting scholars, and leaders in the fields of human rights and social justice. The building’s exterior walls are constructed using wood masonry to achieve a high-performing, low carbon façade.
MH | Do you have a favorite out of all the work you've done so far?
JG | It's a hard question. I get so interested in all of our projects in different ways. I really like working with community groups as clients. I like working with materials and on projects that are strongly material-oriented. With taller buildings, there's a different kind of skill that comes in which has to do with pattern, and with working through different construction scenarios. I guess I like the variety—that's the thing I really like, having the variety. I appreciate cultural projects more and more because of the way that the public can go visit them. They're not off-limits.
MH | Tell me more about the process of compiling a monograph.
JG | A major part of it was trying to help people see the threads that connect all of our work, both across different typologies and across different modes of our practice, because we do much more than just client-funded buildings. Many times I found that the projects we put in one chapter could have easily gone into another. The book articulates the overall themes that are of interest to us, the things that we continue to work on, and the things that are evolving.
MH | Your monograph was the jumping-off point for this conversation, and as we come to a close, I’m wondering—What do you like to read?
JG | I’m always reading. Right now it’s The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, which looks at how trees work as communities; the writings of Bruno Latour; and Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson, which looks at different ways that landscapes function. Julia writes about some of the same places that I looked at in my second book, Reverse Effect. (4) The city of Bangalore, for example, where there is a kind of closed-loop system between trash collection, separation, and the water system, in that certain kinds of bio waste feeds fish that are then harvested. This system, mind you, is almost maxed out, but it's a great example of how things could work in an environmental circle with very little waste. Another example is Xochimilco in Mexico—it's another wetland, which is part of one of the last lakes left in Mexico City. It is also an ecological system that is dealing with waste. Again, it's almost maxed out and practically not functional, but it shows us a way forward for how we can design future urban systems.
MH | In the monograph, you wrote that buildings are manifestations of societal values. What are your top social values that you'd like to see expressed in architecture?
JG| Working to stop climate change, for one. Figuring out what we need to do to make buildings no-energy use and beyond carbon-neutral, and not always in highly technical ways—there are many low-tech strategies and materials, for example, like wood masonry or compressed earth blocks. That, and working on critical social issues in cities, trying to create a more equitable society.
Endnotes
(1) Jeanne Gang, “Healing the Machine,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 40 (2015): 29.
(2) Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang: Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2020), 120.
(3) Gang, “Healing the Machine,” 29.
(4) Reverse Effect (Chicago: Studio Gang, 2012) explored the design potential sparked by the Natural Resources Defense Council’s report calling for a barrier in the Chicago River’s South Branch to separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi Watersheds and thereby prevent invasive carp from entering Lake Michigan. A collaboration between Studio Gang, the NRDC, and students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the book explores how dividing the river could also connect and renew surrounding neighborhoods.
Bio
Miriam Ho is a co-editor-in-chief of -SITE Magazine. She is a writer, editor, installation artist and architectural designer. She previously worked for internationally renowned architects Philip Beesley and Shigeru Ban.
