Aqua Tower

ADDRESS: 225 North Columbus Drive, Chicago, IL ARCHITECTS: Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang ArchitectsYEARS BUILT: 2007-09 Chicago invented the skyscraper. Then it spent a hundred years repeating itself. Walk down any block in the Loop and count the glass boxes. They rise clean, rational, merciless. Louis Sullivan believed form follows function. Mies van der Rohe believed less is more. Their students believed the same thing, and their students' students, until the entire skyline became a single argument repeated in glass and steel across every square mile of the lakefront. The argument is this: a building should look like what it is. A tower is a tower. A box is a box. Ornament is a crime.For a century, nobody in Chicago seriously challenged that argument. Then, in 2004, an architect named Jeanne Gang sat down to dinner. The story goes like this. Developer James Loewenberg had a problem. He was building a cluster of towers in the Lakeshore East neighborhood, a new development rising from w