Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang, founding principal of Studio Gang, is internationally recognized for her innovative approach to materiality, ecology, and urbanism. A 2011 MacArthur Fellow and one of TIME magazine’s most influential people, Gang has redefined contemporary architecture with projects that range from cultural institutions to community-based spaces and record-setting towers like Aqua in Chicago and St. Regis Tower.

Speaking at In Focus: Radical Repair, Gang described her long-standing interest in “finding new ways to describe intervening with old buildings.” She has settled on the phrase “the art of architectural grafting”—also the title of her forthcoming book—which captures her studio’s philosophy of fusing historic structures with transformative, contemporary design.

Among the projects she highlighted was the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Conceived as a porous, geological-like form that both contrasts with and relates to the Victorian Gothic context of the original museum, the new wing embodies her notion of grafting. As Gang explained: “This project grafts into the existing building… It's like a geological structure that holds it up. We were inspired by these landscapes of discovery where forms are hollowed out, they're porous.”