An architect’s vision for a new kind of aquarium.

By Amy Waldman

Dolphin Bay, at the Texas State Aquarium, in Corpus Christi, is a twelve-foot-deep, pale-blue pool with a concrete bottom. It is home to Kai and Shadow, two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins the color of storm clouds. Twice a day, they perform in a show that is meant to inspire visitors to “help protect our planet,” the m.c. tells the audience. For the promise of dead fish, the dolphins ferry rubber ducks, leap and twirl, and wave and bow to the beats of Katy Perry. 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.

On a Sunday in March, Jeanne Gang sat in the bleachers and looked out onto the bay that flows next to the aquarium. A pod of dolphins was surfacing among the waves, though most of the audience seemed not to notice. The juxtaposition of captive and wild transfixed Gang. “Jump!” she urged Kai and Shadow after the show, half in jest. Gang, who is fifty, has striking blue-gray eyes, brown curls, and a casual air. She is best known for designing Aqua, a tower in Chicago, which was completed in 2010. 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. At eight hundred and fifty-nine feet, it is the tallest structure ever designed by a female-led firm.

Design awards, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and international acclaim followed the building’s construction. More tower commissions did not, in part because of the global recession. Instead, Gang took her practice deeper into an area of long-standing interest: the relationship between nature and culture. Last year, the National Aquarium, in Baltimore, asked her to help express, through design, a signal change in its mission. It wanted to move from being an aquarium that dabbled in conservation to being a conservation organization that has an aquarium. 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. . . .

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