If Carol Ross Barney had a coat of arms, it might be emblazoned with Chicago’s skyline and the motto, “Good spaces make good people.”

As the so-called People’s Architect of the Windy City, Carol has dedicated her career to “the dignity of design,” as she puts it — that is, to creating urban spaces that make a city more beautiful, more usable, and more pleasing to inhabit. “Good architecture shouldn’t be a privilege just some people get,” she says. “It should hold cities together and make them more livable for everyone.”

To that end, she’s designed some of Chicago’s best-known and best-loved public spaces, from the revamped Chicago Cultural Center to the Searle Visitor Center at Lincoln Park Zoo to McDonald’s Chicago Flagship restaurant downtown to the fabled Riverwalk. That talent and her generous ethic have won Carol more than 200 design awards in a long and illustrious career.

But it’s a career that almost didn’t happen. Going off to architecture school at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, she discovered women were a rarity in the field. A teaching assistant in one of Carol’s first design courses told her he didn’t think women even belonged in architecture—and flunked her.

Lucky for all of us, she battled her way back. Read how this remarkable woman persisted and ultimately climbed to the very top of a male-dominated profession.