Chicago, 1997.

Studio Gang is the practice of the architect Jeanne Gang, and its name joins a common word to her surname. The New Yorker, in a column by Paul Goldberger dated 24 January 2010, says Gang had run her own firm since 1997. Wikipedia gives the same year and says the firm was founded by Gang in Chicago.

Metropolis, in a profile by Stephen Zacks published in June 2008, traces the route to that point. The magazine says that after studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gang spent a few years working for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, moving between its office in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais project in Lille and the Maison à Bordeaux. She then returned to Illinois and, after a short stint at the Chicago practice Booth Hansen, set up on her own.

The same profile quotes Mark Schendel, described as her partner in the firm, who joined her in Chicago in 1998 and who had also studied at Harvard and worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Schendel told the magazine that starting in Chicago had been Gang’s hunch: she could have begun in New York or Los Angeles, he said, but she knew the city and its people, and he felt clients there might take a chance on a talented but untested firm. Metropolis says Gang’s early work included a commission in 1997 for the Starlight Theatre, an open-air performance space with a folding roof on the campus of Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, not far from her hometown.

The magazine also describes the studio at work in 2008, with teams grouped around the office on projects that included a film and media school for Columbia College Chicago and a community centre for SOS Children’s Villages on Chicago’s South Side. That mix of a Chicago base, small public buildings and research into structure is how the practice was presented in the press in its early years.

From Studio Gang/O’Donnell to Studio Gang.

The name has not always been a single surname. The Chicago Tribune, in an article published on 15 June 2003, said the renovated Starlight Theatre in Rockford had just hosted a performance under its new retractable roof, and credited the work to Gang and her firm, Studio Gang/O’Donnell, which the newspaper said was by then called Studio Gang. The shorter form keeps the word Studio and one surname, with no slash or second name.

The Tribune described the theatre project as a three-phase plan that let the theatre raise money as the work went along. It said phase one, completed two years earlier, enlarged the seating bowl and added a curving concrete block at the back that housed the box office and restrooms, with porthole-like openings lit from behind at night to suggest constellations. A second phase, the newspaper said, was finished the previous year, and the third added the roof that opens like the petals of a flower. Wikipedia dates the completed theatre to 2003.

The building that brought the name to the Chicago skyline was Aqua. The New Yorker described it in January 2010 as a new apartment tower in the centre of Chicago, and said Gang had not designed a skyscraper before and came to it almost by accident: she was seated at a dinner next to Jim Lowenberg, a developer working at Lakeshore East, a development over the old Illinois Central rail yards, who offered her a prime site there. The magazine said Gang started with a fairly conventional rectangular glass slab and wrapped it on all four sides with thin, curving concrete balconies, which shade apartments from the summer sun and break up the wind. Metropolis had visited the site during construction in 2008 and described the same idea, with reinforced-concrete slabs extended into rippling balconies. Wikipedia dates the completion of Aqua to 2010.

Names, books, models and photographs.

An architecture practice rarely sells a product off a shelf, so its identity lives in a handful of recurring surfaces. The first is the name itself. Many practices are named after their founders, and the way those names are joined says a good deal: a plus sign, an ampersand, a comma or a plain run of surnames each sets a different tone, and a change of partners often means a change of name. Initials and acronyms do similar work, compressing several people into a short mark that fits on a drawing title block.

The second surface is the published work. Monographs, exhibition catalogues and the practice’s own books carry its typography, layout and image style into libraries and bookshops, often for longer than any website. Models are a third surface: the material, scale and finish of a presentation model become part of how a studio is recognised. The fourth is photography of finished buildings, where the choice of photographer, framing and light repeats across press kits, websites and lectures. For a design guide, these surfaces show how a practice keeps a consistent voice while its buildings differ in place, programme and material.

A second tower at Lakeshore East and four home cities.

The practice returned to Lakeshore East for a second tower. The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic Blair Kamin, writing on 23 November 2020, reviewed the nearly complete Vista Tower on a riverfront site that belongs to the same development as Aqua. He said Gang designed it with Julianne Wolf, a principal at Studio Gang, and that it consists of three connected high-rises, or stems, clad in what appears to be curving, multicoloured glass. Kamin said the developers were Dalian Wanda Group and Chicago’s Magellan Development Group, that Wanda’s hotel unit had agreed in July 2020 to sell its stake in the tower to Magellan, and that bKL Architecture of Chicago was architect of record. Wikipedia says the tower, now called the St. Regis Chicago, was completed in 2020.

In New York, Wikipedia says the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History, designed by Studio Gang, opened in May 2023, and that its curving façade is clad in Milford Pink granite, the same stone used on the museum’s west side. The same source lists the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock among projects completed in 2023.

The practice now presents itself as a group of offices rather than a single Chicago studio. The company says it is based in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Paris, and describes the four as its “home cities”. It says staff from the four offices meet each summer for a retreat at Camp Wandawega in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Wikipedia lists the same four offices and describes the practice as an architecture and urban design firm founded and led by Gang.

For a design guide, Studio Gang shows how a short name can hold steady while a practice grows from one city to four: a common word, one surname, and an earlier slash and second name dropped by 2003. Compare Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, another practice founded in Chicago and named after its partners, and Gensler, a practice named after a single founder’s surname. For this guide we use lake blue, slate and deep water with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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