With her addition to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Jeanne Gang, our 2022 Architecture Innovator, is shining a light on the power of architecture to bring people closer to the natural world—and to each other.⁠ ⁠ At 33, Gang set up a solo practice, @studiogang, back in Chicago rather than continue to toe the line at a mega-firm, as many of her contemporaries were doing. “I just wanted to create my own way of working,” she says. “I was never going anywhere else.” Late-'90s Chicago presented plenty of street-corner design problems to solve, and Gang took on community centers and other projects where her growing interests in the social and environmental roles of architecture came into play. “The social response was really driven by my own family,” she says. “Kind of what my mom was doing all the time.”(Her mother, Marjorie Gang, was a part-time librarian, a volunteer and “kind of a community organizer,” Gang says.)⁠ ⁠ Gang's definition of “the social response” is broad and deep. It could encompass the firm's current project in Memphis, where a six-mile sliver of Mississippi River coastline is being regenerated after failing a community in dire need of recreation space. Or it could mean the partnership Studio Gang struck with a Memphis community organization to form a youth design leadership program, giving teens a voice in what would get built while introducing them to what designers do. The architect calls this sort of work, drawing on design's ability to build public awareness and awaken change, “actionable idealism,” and it's a keystone of Studio Gang's pragmatically minded process. In her view, architects are uniquely trained to reconcile vexing issues and competing interests. Why not use that training to edge us toward a more equitable, livable world? Read more about our 2022 Architecture Innovator, at the link in bio. (🖊️: @samedford, 📷️: @martienmulder, hair: @daveydidmyhair, makeup: @mualook_aya, production: @kindlyproductions)