Even the Jimmy Buffett blasting through the boat’s speakers was an attempt to “speak” to the cetaceans, which, the boat’s captains believe, now recognize the steel drums and sax notes reverberating through its aluminum frame. The dolphins frolicked near a built-up shoreline and played in surf churned up by a giant barge. It was her first glimpse of dolphins in the wild, although wild was a relative term. Nothing hinted at the life beneath the waves until a bulletin came over the loudspeaker: “There’s some dolphins over there.” But the sea, the least architected space on the planet, stretched blankly before her. The air teemed with birds: Gang pointed to a brown pelican flying by, then to a colony of white ones resting on an island shore. As the boat headed out into the Corpus Christi ship channel, Gang and a few students climbed to the top deck. The day before the show, the group drove to Port Aransas, Texas, and boarded a thirty-six-foot catamaran called the Kohootz. She was also conducting research of her own. On the weekend of the dolphin show, she had brought eleven students to the Gulf Coast to do research. At Rice University, in Houston, where she was teaching for a semester, she asked her class to design dolphin sanctuaries. And, at a time of growing public unease about keeping cetaceans in captivity, it was contemplating something unprecedented: moving its eight dolphins to a sanctuary.įor months, Gang read up on the cognitive and social capabilities of dolphins. It wanted to move from being an aquarium that dabbled in conservation to being a conservation organization that has an aquarium. Last year, the National Aquarium, in Baltimore, asked her to help express, through design, a signal change in its mission. Instead, Gang took her practice deeper into an area of long-standing interest: the relationship between nature and culture. More tower commissions did not, in part because of the global recession. At eight hundred and fifty-nine feet, it is the tallest structure ever designed by a female-led firm.ĭesign awards, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and international acclaim followed the building’s construction. To maximize views and shade, she unevenly distended the concrete balconies on each floor, creating a rippling surface that suggests a natural topography-hills, valleys, pools-rising into the air.

She is best known for designing Aqua, a tower in Chicago, which was completed in 2010. Gang, who is fifty, has striking blue-gray eyes, brown curls, and a casual air. “Jump!” she urged Kai and Shadow after the show, half in jest. The juxtaposition of captive and wild transfixed Gang. A pod of dolphins was surfacing among the waves, though most of the audience seemed not to notice. On a Sunday in March, Jeanne Gang sat in the bleachers and looked out onto the bay that flows next to the aquarium. At the beginning of the show and again toward the end, Kai and Shadow rise on cue to flap their pectoral fins for their corporate sponsor, Whataburger.

For the promise of dead fish, the dolphins ferry rubber ducks, leap and twirl, and wave and bow to the beats of Katy Perry. Twice a day, they perform in a show that is meant to inspire visitors to “help protect our planet,” the m.c. It is home to Kai and Shadow, two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins the color of storm clouds. “It’s about trying to find that space where it’s art.” Photograph by Jenny Huestonĭolphin Bay, at the Texas State Aquarium, in Corpus Christi, is a twelve-foot-deep, pale-blue pool with a concrete bottom. “It’s impossible to replicate nature-it’s too good,” Jeanne Gang says.

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