These Are the Women Who Changed Modern Architecture

"When I began practicing, not much attention had been paid to tall buildings for quite a while beyond the realm of corporate architecture," explains Jeanne Gang, founder of her Chicago-based firm Studio Gang. "I thought they deserved to be considered in a new way, and there seemed to be a lot of fertile territory not yet explored." Since designing the eighty-two-story Aqua Tower in 2010, Studio Gang has continued to create sculptural skyscrapers that reject the traditionally hermetic environments of their predecessors by, for instance, extending the indoor/outdoor threshold of each unit with terraces that stand in for traditional porches. Over the past 20 years, the firm has grown to more than 130 people working from offices in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Paris. At her firm, Gang discovered and fixed a small but unexpected pay gap between men and women, and called on other leaders to do the same. "Equal pay puts you at the same level," she says. "It’s the key to being respected by your peers."