Chicagoans of the Year

Today's Chicago Tribune features the paper's critics' choices for Chicagoans of the Year. Blair Kamin's votes for Jeanne Gang, who definitely has had quite a year, from the Masonry Variations Exhibit at the National Building Museum and its awards to the recent Chicago Architecture Ten Visions Exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. In between were the winning entries for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center and the Hoboken September 11 Memorial, the opening of the Kam Liu Building in Chinatown.







Kamin mentions their consultant work for Lakeshore East. Hired by the developer/architect Jim Loewenberg, designer of many of Chicago's ugliest towers of late, Gang's contribution should help the large development under construction east of the Loop. He concludes,

As impressive as Gang's output has been, the most telling sign of her success is the stack of resumes that sit on a desk inside her firm's office. Many are from out-of-town architects, including some from overseas. Word about Gang and her firm is clearly spreading, as is word of Chicago's architectural revival after the largely dormant decade of the 1990s.