Inside the pages of Tanja Kullack’s new book, Architecture: A Woman’s Profession (Jovis), designers like Denise Scott Brown, Barbara Holzer, and Monica Ponce de Leon sound off on topics like “Authorship and Genius,” “Subversiveness,” and “Respect and Self-Respect,” each speaking in turn in the style of a roundtable conversation. Taken together, they furnish a full-spectrum view of the female experience in architecture. One of the voices included stands out for her wit and candor: Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang, whose proposal “The Garden in the Machine” is featured in the The Museum of Modern Art’s “Foreclosed” exhibition that opened this week. Her firm, Studio Gang, has drawn praise for its 2009 hometown project, the Aqua Tower, even as some critics claim to detect a uniquely “female” presence in the skyscraper’s rolling contoured outline. We asked Gang about her participation in the new book, and about the purported femininity of her signature project.

In the book, you say that the critical claim of “womanliness” in the Aqua design propagates a stereotype. Does that mean that those critics are exhibiting a kind of sexism?
Multiple readings of a work of architecture is not such a bad thing. Though I wasn’t considering the Aqua Tower to be “feminine” during the design process, it doesn’t bother me that people have read it that way. A building should take on a life of its own and should not have to be chained to its author’s intention.

The Aqua Building, Chicago (2010).

You also mention that some journalists have balked at calling you the designer of your projects, hedging instead and asking if you worked on them. Since you’ve become better and better known in the field—especially since Aqua—has this hesitancy about nomenclature stopped?
That still happens, but now I think it may have to do with the fact that our practice is so non-traditional. People know that I spend time on infrastructure, ecology, and books in addition to designing buildings—maybe the hesitation is about trying to characterize what I do rather than having difficulty with calling me a designer.

Developed for The Museum of Modern Art’s “Foreclosed” exhibition, “The Garden in the Machine” is a proposal for transforming the inner-ring suburb of Cicero, Illinois.

What was the experience of participating in the book like? Especially since you’re kind of suspicious about the idea of a specifically woman’s architecture.
First, Tanja sent out a questionnaire. She called me later and said she had changed tactics and wanted to conduct a series of conversations instead, [so we] sat down in the lobby of my hotel and she interviewed me. It was a conversation, really, that was choreographed around certain topics. I was always supportive of this project. Just because I don’t think curved buildings belong to women architects or towers belong to men doesn’t mean I disregard the importance of diversity in the field.

Title image: Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago (2010). Images courtesy of Studio Gang.
Architecture: A Woman's Profession (Jovis Verlag)
Studio Gang