The Firm Award is the highest honor a Chicago firm can receive
from the local chapter of The American Institute of Architects.
Studio Gang, a leading global architecture and urban design firm founded in Chicago nearly thirty years ago, has been named the 2026 recipient of the prestigious AIA Chicago Firm Award. This distinguished honor recognizes outstanding achievements and excellence in the body of work produced by a firm over a period of time, the distinctive characteristics of a firm and its operations, and the ongoing contributions of the firm to the advancement of the architectural profession.
“Studio Gang embodies all this award was created to celebrate and honor,” said AIA Chicago’s Executive Director Jen Masengarb, Assoc. AIA. “Over nearly thirty years, they have demonstrated what it looks like when design excellence and genuine care for community go hand in hand. The firm’s culture and core values are reflected in their thoughtful public engagement, design rigor, technical innovation, and environmental stewardship. Studio Gang is deeply rooted in Chicago, while also having a global impact on the way our profession sees its responsibility to people, place, and the planet.”
Founded and led by architect Jeanne Gang, FAIA,—a MacArthur Fellow who has been named one of TIME Magazine’s most influential people in the world—Studio Gang is an architecture and urban design firm with more than 130 architects, designers, and planners. Since establishing their Chicago office in 1997, the Studio has expanded organically to three additional cities: New York, San Francisco, and Paris. Jeanne’s leadership is augmented by the Studio’s seven additional Partners, who collectively oversee the firm’s portfolio and four offices. Juliane Wolf, AIA, Design Principal and Partner, leads the firm’s Chicago office.
Across all scales and typologies, Studio Gang uses design to create and strengthen connections between people, communities, and the natural world. Driven by the belief that architecture can help address the most pressing challenges facing our planet and society today, the Studio seeks out ways for design to effect change and make progress towards a brighter future—a practice they call “actionable idealism.” Each project is guided by Jeanne Gang’s motto of “start with what’s there,” resulting in architecture that draws upon the existing positive qualities of its context to create beauty, increase functionality, and foster inclusivity.
Extending beyond the firm’s award-winning portfolio, Studio Gang’s strong sense of social and environmental responsibility also shapes the firm’s culture and engagement with the profession and wider public. The Studio’s collaborative and creative working environment has fostered internal equity initiatives, including a one-on-one mentorship program and an employee-led Equity Action Task Force, which developed a progressive parental leave policy adopted by the firm. A prominent voice within the profession and beyond, Jeanne Gang has continued to bring attention to urgent issues such as pay inequity, climate change, and bird safety through exhibitions, publications, and other forms of thought leadership and civic engagement.
In making the award, the jury noted that “Studio Gang’s impact and legacy extends well beyond individual projects, encompassing global influence on sustainable design, public engagement, and the evolution of architectural practice.”
“Chicago has one of the richest architectural legacies of any American city, and AIA Chicago has played an important role supporting this history and culture. Their advocacy for architects and the profession for more than 150 years has helped make Chicago a great place to design, to practice, and to build,” said Jeanne Gang, FAIA, Founding Partner, Studio Gang. “Being recognized by AIA Chicago as part of this legacy is an incredible honor. Even as we’ve grown to become an international firm, Chicago remains in our DNA, and deep inside our heart and soul.”
The jury also noted that Studio Gang’s “conceptual rigor, technical innovation, and environmental leadership of the work actively shapes public discourse, cities, communities, and the future of the design industry.”
“We’re so proud to call Chicago our home and be part of its strong architecture community,” said Juliane Wolf, AIA, Design Principal and Partner leading Studio Gang’s Chicago office. “We’ve had the honor to help shape this city through designs that range from boathouses along the riverfront and restored ecological habitats in the heart of the city, to skyscrapers that have redrawn the skyline. To have this work and our firm celebrated with AIA Chicago’s Firm Award is a special moment for us.”
Among the firm’s notable work are:
The St. Regis Chicago | Chicago, Illinois
Now the third tallest building in the Chicago skyline, the design reimagines the skyscraper as a porous connector, rather than barrier, for the public realm. Defining a new edge of the city, the tower tightly knits the downtown Lakeshore East community to its surroundings with unprecedented urban connections and enhanced public access to the Chicago River. Housing condominiums, a 5-star hotel, restaurants, and amenity spaces, the building’s residential and hotel amenities combine at the upper levels to create a vibrant social center. Looking up from the river and park, the tower presents itself as three interconnected volumes of differing heights. Moving rhythmically in and out of plane, the overall flowing appearance of the building is the result of an alternating geometry between these three volumes. An innovative structural system allows the central volume to be lifted from the ground plane, creating a new essential pedestrian connection between the Chicago Riverwalk and the nearby community park’s outdoor recreational facilities.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts | Little Rock, Arkansas
The project creates a vibrant space for social interaction, education, and appreciation for the arts, transforming this premier cultural institution into a signature civic asset. Working from the inside out, the design—which includes both new construction and renovations—clarifies the organization of the building’s interior while also extending the museum’s presence into historic MacArthur Park, opening it to the city of Little Rock and beckoning the public within. Conceived as a stem that blossoms to the north and south and anchored by major new visitor amenities, the design mediates between the museum’s existing architecture to define a new public gallery and gathering space that provides an unprecedented axis of connectivity linking the museum’s disparate programs and also serves as a focal point for extensive renovations that help AMFA meet its growing visitor needs.
The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris | Paris France
The University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris is a new hub for scholarship and cultural exchange in the rapidly developing Paris Rive Gauche neighborhood of the 13th arrondissement. Built atop a compact site that spans an active railway, the architecture gives rise to a gracious campus environment where intellectual work is enlivened with social activity and biodiverse habitat. The building is organized around a transparent central atrium that acts as a vertical campus, connecting all of the Center’s major spaces and bringing natural light deep into the interior. Learning, working, and social spaces are strategically arranged around this central circulation zone, encouraging interaction among academic departments and users. A variety of outdoor green spaces, including a biodiverse rooftop garden, provide students, faculty, and guests with easy access to nature and fresh air. Cylindrical stone batons form a brise-soleil façade that shades the building and lends it a sense of lightness. Constructed with regionally quarried Lutetian limestone, the “Paris stone” that gives much of the city its unique color, this material helps harmonize the Center with its surroundings as well as reduces its carbon footprint.
The team at Studio Gang will be celebrated at an upcoming AIA Chicago event on August 6th at 5:00pm at the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), 111 E Wacker Drive, Chicago IL 60601. The celebration will coincide with Studio Gang’s current exhibition, entitled Flyway City: Architecture for a Flourishing Ecosystem. Designed and co-curated in collaboration with the CAC, the exhibition addresses how the public can take action to make cities safer and more welcoming for birds and diverse wildlife. The public is welcome to attend and tickets are available for purchase here.
Studio Gang will be conferred the Firm of the Year Award at AIA Chicago’s Designight 2026, Chicago’s premier architectural celebration, on Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 6:00pm, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park.
The Firm Award is selected by a jury of leaders and principals of previous AIA Chicago Firm Award recipient firms, and representatives from the recent AIA National Firm Award recipient. This year’s jury was comprised of Jury Chair Meghan Webster, AIA, Principal & Co-Managing Director, Gensler; Rachel Killion, Assoc. AIA, Senior Associate and Director of Professional Development, Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture; Joy Meek, AIA, Principal, Wheeler Kearns Architects, Inc.; Juan J. Robles, AIA, Principal, bKL Architecture; Anne Marie Duvall Decker, FAIA Principal, Duvall Decker.
Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park
205 E Randolph St, Chicago, IL 60601
Thursday, October 1, 2026
6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. with After Party to follow
About AIA Chicago
With a membership exceeding 3,500 individuals—including licensed architects, architectural designers, and a broad network of industry partners and students—AIA Chicago is one of the largest and most influential local chapters of The American Institute of Architects in the country. AIA Chicago’s mission builds on the city’s architectural legacy by advocating for the profession, sharing knowledge among members, and partnering with communities. The chapter fosters a culture of design excellence for equitable, sustainable places and spaces.
AIA Chicago offers lectures and continuing education courses; specialized, issue-specific Knowledge Communities; advocacy for architects; and help for consumers looking for an architect.
AIA Chicago is the local Chicago chapter of The American Institute of Architects. Based in Washington, D.C., the AIA has been the leading professional membership association for licensed architects, emerging professionals, and allied partners since 1857. Learn more by visiting AIAChicago.org.
About Studio Gang
Studio Gang is an internationally recognized architecture and urban design practice founded and led by MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang. Based in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco and Paris, the Studio works as a collective of over 100 architects, designers and planners that use an iterative, research-based design process to create places that strengthen relationships between people, communities and the natural world.
Studio Gang’s diverse, award-winning portfolio includes cultural centers, public spaces, high-rise towers and strategic framework plans. Notable among these are the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the reimagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock; the University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris; and the David Rubenstein Treehouse, Harvard University’s first mass timber building.
In addition, Studio Gang is currently designing cultural, civic and educational projects across Europe and the Americas, including the new United States Embassy in Brasília and an expansion of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
Studio Gang also develops research, publications and exhibitions that push design’s ability to create public awareness and give rise to change — a practice the Studio calls “actionable idealism.” Jeanne Gang’s most recent book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, which provides a new framework for bringing new life to older structures, was released in 2024 in both English and French editions.
The Studio has been honored with numerous awards, including AIA California’s 2025 Firm of the Year, Dezeen Jobs’ Top Companies and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company in Architecture.