(gentle music) - I'm not in that race to be in the tallest, but I want the building to have high quality and be interesting and be wonderful to live in.

If it's something that's popping out.

- [Narrator] Architect Jeanne Gang may not have wanted to be in the race, but she's already won.

Gang designed the city's third tallest tower, the St.

Regis, and set a world record in the process.

- This is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman architect.

I'm just thrilled that she's been able to accomplish that here in Chicago.

- And boy, does that building sparkle at night from the river.

It is absolutely beautiful.

- [Narrator] Long before Gang transformed the city skyline, even before she studied architecture at the University of Illinois and Harvard, her family would drive 70 miles from their home in Belvedere, Illinois to visit Chicago.

Even today, she remembers her first look at the skyline.

- It has a shape and it looks like it's one thing.

And then as you get closer and closer and it becomes many things and, you know, it's so interesting that way it pixelates and you get inside the city and you're on the street walking between giant buildings.

- [Narrator] When Gang opened her studio, it focused on designing small community centers.

Her break came unexpectedly when she met developer Jim Loewenberg at a dinner party.

- Jim was looking for an architect for a new tower that he wanted to build in the area just north of Millennium Park.

- He asked me to, you know, come talk about doing a building there.

I did not know it was gonna be a tall building, a very tall building.

I was really excited and curious, like how, what can we do with this building type?

How can we reinvent it?

- [Narrator] Her solution was the 86-story Aqua Tower where the shape of each balcony was subtly tweaked to create a skyscraper that appeared to flow like water.

- We really designed it in three dimensions.

It's more like a sculpture, so it wouldn't look like anything if you just drew it as an elevation.

It really, we had to understand it by moving around it.

What's happening to the curves as they turn, how do they develop into bigger movements?

- Jeanne in Aqua was clearly in conversation with the lake, the lake which is constantly moving.

And Jeanne picked that up and did it vertically.

- [Narrator] Gang not only envisioned Aqua in dialogue with nature, she encouraged connection between neighbors, creating a kind of community in the sky.

- Maybe you're not having a conversation on the 80th floor to the 79th floor, but you are aware that there's other people living there.

It's not isolating like a lot of tall buildings can be.

It wasn't only about the image, it was really about how to make a more social building.

- [Narrator] Aqua announced a major new talent in contemporary architecture.

- It's stunning, it's a monument.

She's such a good storyteller that it makes her tall buildings very, very romantic and it makes people want to build them and it makes people want to see Chicago.

And architecture has that role.

- [Narrator] Loewenberg came calling again in 2014 and commissioned a new project even taller than the last, the St.

Regis.

(dramatic music) The multi-use building, which includes high-end residences, restaurants, and a hotel, rises to nearly 1,200 feet.

- When you're driving north from the Field Museum of Natural History, the St.

Regis Tower just explodes into view and dominates that view in a way that's really gives it a landmark presence.

- [Narrator] Gang's distinctive design fuses three towers that appear to undulate upward.

- She very ingeniously determined that if you adjusted the columns of the building slightly outward from the one below it, you know, like this and like this and like this.

- Increasing the floor plates by four inches each time.

- And then inward like this and like this and like this.

- [Jeanne] So it actually looks almost like it's curving in and out, but there's no curves on this building at all.

- And that is what gives this building its very distinctive skyline presence.

- By these small moves, they add up to something much bigger.

- [Narrator] Engineers faced a familiar problem at the top floors, fierce winds.

So they emptied two floors 83 stories off the ground to reduce sway, creating what's called a blow-through.

- Well, let the wind pass through it and that just basically solved it.

So it was the first building in Chicago to use that.

- [Narrator] The combination of six different colors of glass on the facade mimicked the hues of the lake.

- One of the thing that is true of every building she's ever done, and I can't imagine it ever changing, is a conversation with nature.

- [Narrator] The St.

Regis Tower opened in 2020.

The skyline that entranced Gang as a young girl from Belvedere, Illinois now bears her own mark.

- No architect on the planet wants to be called a woman architect.

They want to be called an architect.

But the truth of the matter is it's important to see them as women architects because they're such an example for what has to happen.