Longtime friend of architecture standout Gang joins firm

Gregg A. Garmisa met Jeanne Gang long before she was the international architecture standout that she is today.

That’s partly why their first meeting didn’t go so well.

It was the late 1990s, and Gang’s work was more likely to be displayed in Chicago’s museums than cityscapes around the globe.

Now, the world is the canvas for Studio Gang Architects, the celebrated Wicker Park architecture firm that named Garmisa a principal and its first general counsel in March.

But Gang’s way of thinking — hallmarked by sustainability and using building materials in ways that highlight their lesser-known characteristics — wasn’t yet embraced 15 years ago. That’s when she met with Garmisa and his former employer, WMA Consulting Engineers Ltd.

She wanted to hire a consultant on a project she was designing for a local college. WMA pushed back on some of her ideas.

“The way she wanted this building to be designed was a breath of fresh air,” Garmisa said. “It was already clear to me, even in that very first meeting, that she was interested in doing things differently. … Because of that, she met with some resistance.”

The construction industry can be stubborn, Garmisa said. But he was new to the scene, having joined WMA just a few years prior from an early career in government and public policy. Like Gang, he employs a way of thinking about new ideas and people: If they have appeal, embrace them.

So he called Gang to invite her to a Chicago Bulls game. They have been friends ever since, with the architect calling Garmisa “one of Studio Gang’s earliest collaborators.” WMA eventually worked on a number of Gang’s projects.

Garmisa calls himself “one of (Gang’s) biggest boosters,” which is also how his new role can be described: supporting Studio Gang in any way he can as it kicks into serious growth mode.

“I feel really humbled to be here,” Garmisa said. “I view my being here as a great opportunity for me to help — even in a very small, incremental way — this incredible collection of very creative, very bright people, led by Jeanne Gang, to continue to grow and thrive.

“I have no doubt about their ability to continue to do exactly that without me. I’m just glad that I have this current opportunity to hopefully help them do what they’re going to do anyway.”

The Gang is growing

Perhaps best known for creating Chicago’s 82-story Aqua Tower — and its unique, wave-like concrete terraces — Gang received a MacArthur Fellowship award, commonly called a “genius grant,” and $500,000 in 2011 as “an architect challenging the aesthetic and technical possibilities of the art form,” according to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Studio Gang’s buildings and designs are now going global, with the firm asked to draft designs in, among other places, Hamburg, Germany; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; and Australia.

The effect of all that work is easy to see in Studio Gang’s bustling, overflowing office above a retail store on Ashland Avenue, steps from an entrance to the Blue Line’s Division Street stop.

Foam building mock-ups cover almost every free desk or counter-top space, which make visitors feel as if they’re stepping into a very creative and unusually meticulous child’s Lego city.

There is not much free space, however, as desks that once sat one architect have been reconfigured to house two. Even the company’s lawyer, Garmisa, doesn’t have a private office. Like others who need a moment of privacy, he ducks into Gang’s office when she is away.

One of Garmisa’s first legal assignments at Studio Gang has been to help move its office one-tenth of a mile away to a building at 1514 W. Division St.

“Growth is not just going to be within this Wicker Park area,” Garmisa said. “I think that within very short order, you’ll see us planting the flag elsewhere geographically. And that’s exciting too, to be able to help the firm branch out beyond Chicago.”

When asked where that may be, Garmisa responded: “Where the work is. And it will be soon.”

The addition of Garmisa is, in itself, a sign of growth. He will support the burgeoning firm in three ways.

The first is by handling legal work including contract negotiations and regulatory requirements. Second, he will tap Studio Gang into what his colleagues described as one of his greatest assets: his coast-to-coast personal network built from graduating from Stanford University and then working on Capitol Hill. Finally, he will help with some of the administrative tasks, such as policy-making, that a growing company requires.

One thing he will not spend much time on is litigation. Since Studio Gang opened in 1997, it has faced one lawsuit — a slip-and-fall claim — that was dismissed.

“This collective of very creative and very bright architects has a pristine bill of health when it comes to litigation,” Garmisa said.

Alvin C. Katz, a partner at Katten, Muchin, Rosenman LLP and a Stanford alumnus who has known Garmisa for more than 30 years, represented Studio Gang in work relating to its upcoming move — which is a relationship that formed from a Garmisa introduction.

“Gregg’s great strengths as a lawyer are his interpersonal skills,” Katz said. “He gets along really well with people. He’s a great consensus builder. He defuses tense situations. He has a nice sense of humor. He uses his soft skills, his personal skills, to his great advantage in the business world by avoiding conflict. … And he’s quite practical.”

Returning to his roots

For Garmisa, working on Chicago’s Northwest Side is a homecoming. Garmisa, his two brothers and one sister were raised by their father and mother in Humboldt Park — just a few blocks west of Studio Gang’s office.

While neither of his parents earned a college degree, Garmisa said they preached the value of education, and his father in particular saw the law as an esteemed profession.

You know the face of Steven P. Garmisa, a Hoey & Farina P.C. attorney and Gregg’s oldest brother, from his Trial Notebook column on the front page of the newspaper. Brother Thomas Garmisa is an attorney at Northern Trust Corp. Their sister, Bonnie, is a researcher at Yale University.

Gregg called his time at Stanford a “life-changing experience” and he credits his undergraduate degree from there to opening his network — and now Studio Gang’s — to a wide world of business contacts. He is the co-chair of the local Stanford admissions outreach network known as OVAL.

“I can travel almost anywhere in the world and set up business meetings or introductory meetings, coffees, lunches or dinners with fellow Stanford graduates anywhere I go,” Garmisa said, adding that he has used that network to connect Gang to people in India and, just a few weeks ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

He called his time at Stanford eye-opening but so too was his next stop: Washington, D.C.

After college, he got a job in the office of U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon, a Democrat from Illinois. Within a year of his arrival, Garmisa became a legislative assistant, helping craft foreign policy.

Working in the early years of President Ronald Reagan’s first term, he began law school at night at Georgetown University Law Center. He also got married while in law school — his wife, Lauren Beth Gash, is a former Illinois state representative. She had their first child in his third year at Georgetown and her first year studying law there.

“It was a lot going on, but here’s the thing: As I look back on it, at the time it didn’t feel overwhelming, because it was all good stuff,” Garmisa said. “I enjoyed every part of it.”

A legal career

Garmisa and his young family moved back to Chicago around 1985, shortly after his father died.

Garmisa took a job at Reuben & Proctor, the high-powered firm that merged with Isham, Lincoln & Beale, which disintegrated in 1988.

Before that firm’s demise, Garmisa jumped to Kirkland & Ellis LLP’s office in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the government and public policy practice. Garmisa left the nation’s capital for good around 1990, when he engineered a move back to Chicago’s largest firm’s original office to work as a bankruptcy attorney.

But his interest in public policy never waned, and when lobbying powerhouse Cassidy and Associates entered Chicago, Garmisa went to work there.

In 1995, he took his job at WMA, where he worked for nearly 20 years before joining Studio Gang.

Mark C. Friedlander, a Schiff, Hardin LLP partner who began working with Garmisa during his time at WMA, said Garmisa’s familiarity with the public arena will be a boon for the architecture firm as it interacts often with government bodies.

Friedlander described Garmisa as a high-powered legal mind who has the ability to focus his attention on the issues that matter and not get stuck on the “prettying details.”

“It is nice to see somebody who had all the brain power and sophistication that you would associate with top educational backgrounds, but who was able to make that work in the real world,” Friedlander said. “And it’s a rare skill.”

Garmisa said he is excited to see how the ideas of his friend — and of Mark Schendel, Gang’s spouse and Studio Gang’s managing principal — will spread around a globe that seems ever more to be embracing them.

“She’s talking about doing things in a new way in an industry where everybody likes to do things the way they’ve always been done,” Garmisa said.

“And yet it’s all packaged in this person who is both exceedingly bright and really friendly and very convincing about how to enact the ideas that she’s proposing. ... And if in the process she’s got to bring along some reluctant people who are involved in the process, it’s incredible. But she manages to do it time and time again.”