STUDIO GANG USA
Founded and led by Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang is an architecture and urban design practice headquartered in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris. The studio works as a collective of architects, designers, and other creative practitioners, who use design as a medium to connect people with each other and their environment. A sustainability ethos is at the heart of the practice, paired with a design methodology defined by research and experimentation that includes frequent collaboration with a wide range of disciplines both inside and outside the traditional design fields. This approach has produced award-winning projects that foster a sense of community and a strong connection with the outdoors.
Their innovative portfolio of housing projects, primarily in North America, consider how to sustainably grow cities and are designed to give rise to more resilient and vibrant cities. Intertwined with built work, the Studio also develops publications and exhibitions that push design’s ability to create public awareness and effect change—a practice Jeanne calls “actionable idealism.”
Recipient of the National Design Award in Architecture and numerous other honors, Studio Gang has exhibited projects at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Building Museum, among others; the Studio’s work is in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. studiogang.com
One Delisle
Toronto, Canada
Area: 34,409 s.m. | Status: Under Construction
One Delisle is a mixed-use residential tower designed to bring diverse opportunities for outdoor living to Toronto on a compact footprint. Anchoring a new development at a key intersection in a transit-rich area, the 44-storey project will provide much-needed housing for the city, growing its neighborhood upward in a way that is sensitive to the existing historic fabric as well as the surrounding parks and public realm.
Responding closely to the surrounding streetscape, the tower’s massing transforms over its height: it morphs from a rectilinear base to a more cylindrical, tapering volume as it rises, to minimize the shadows cast on nearby areas and bring more daylight to the public realm. Set further back to allow for wider sidewalks, the base maintains the fine-grained commercial character of the existing street and houses new retail and restaurants.
Above the base, a green amenity terrace provides shared outdoor space for residents that overlooks a revitalized park at the west.
The architecture is tuned to Toronto’s climate and the sun’s path to improve environmental performance and make its outdoor spaces as comfortable as possible throughout the year. Stacked, eight-storey balcony elements make up the building’s distinctive façade. Their angled shape shields residents from the sun, wind, and rain, extending the balconies’ use into the shoulder seasons while still providing great views. The tower’s dynamic geometry also creates variety in the sizes and shapes of the floorplates, supporting a range of apartment types and lending unique qualities to the living spaces.
Anchoring a new development at a key intersection in a transit-rich area, the 44-storey project will provide much-needed housing for the city
City Hyde Park
Chicago, USA
Area: 46,450 s.m. | Status: Completed 2016
Located in a Chicago neighborhood whose suburban character is changing in favor of greater density, City Hyde Park is a mixed-use, mid-rise residential tower that embraces this urbanizing evolution. To support a lively community, the project prioritizes the pedestrian experience at ground level. New trees shade wider sidewalks and all street frontages are activated with differing programs organized in the base, which features a green roof.
The twelve-storey tower emphasizes its structure. A playful array of stacked concrete panels form columns, bays, sunshades and balconies that offer residents multiple ways in which they can enjoy the outdoors, socialize, and connect to their surrounding neighborhood. On the north facade, alternating wall panels carry gravity loads to the ground, allowing for column-free corners and projecting bays that extend the living spaces and provide additional daylight and views of Chicago’s skyline.
On the sunny south facade, the panels are deployed as balcony “stems” that also act as columns and extend the living spaces—this time, bringing it fully outdoors.
Projecting from the stems in phyllotactic (leaf-like) form, these balconies shade the apartments below and create an abstract, three-dimensional pattern play across the tower’s height. Their orientation creates oblique sight lines between neighbors, allowing residents to transform the facade into an open-air social network that adds texture to its urban surroundings.
City Hyde Park is a mixed-use, mid-rise residential tower that embraces this urbanizing evolution.
