Since the Sixties, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City Towers have been an iconic part of Chicago’s skyline. Millions of readers, moviegoers, and TV-watchers know the twin buildings mean “Chicago”, even when they don’t have a clue what the towers are or how they came to be. Conceived as a “city within a city”, the Marina Towers complex has been through four distinct stages in its history: promise, acclaim, disrepute, and renaissance.
The towers are arguably more stylistically rooted in the Sixties than any other buildings in America; many onlookers misinterpret them as a grandiose, unnecessary realization of the cartooned architecture seen in the “Jetsons” TV show. They could not be more wrong: Goldberg’s complex has much to teach us today. An early attempt to stem the urban exodus to the suburbs, Marina Towers offers a self-contained world: there is little need for residents to leave it. Planned with a theater, restaurant, bowling alley, health club, ice-skating rink, grocery store, bank, and parking garage, the complex both concealed and revealed a secret heritage.
Born in Chicago in 1913, Bertrand Goldberg trained from 1930 to 1936 at both the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) and the Berlin Bauhaus, later meeting, and learning from, Mies van der Rohe. He worked briefly for architects George Fred Keck (of Keck + Keck fame) and Paul Schweikher before starting his own practice in 1936. Goldberg’s Bauhaus training instilled the virtues of simplicity into him; his early commissions included government-sponsored housing in Suitland, Maryland. While modest and boxlike, the Suitland houses conformed to the Bauhausian credo, “Form follows function”.
Goldberg’s later works like Marina City Towers and his Raymond Hilliard Homes of 1966 would seem to have little to do with Bauhausian principles. The architect had become interested in unorthodox engineeering that hung the floors of a building from a central mast, and he was enamored of circular shapes, feeling that they were more humanistic than the rectilinear plans and forms he’d been taught in Berlin. But for the sensitive observer, Marina Towers does adhere to the dictum of the Bauhaus: its form actually does follow its function. Goldberg had not merely created a striking shape; he understood what the complex needed to be about.
Chicago Bauhaus & Beyond
Sunday, March 6, 2005 1-5pm
Symposium on An Icon of Chicago:
Space is Limited - Reservations are a must. All reservations and payments must be received no later than Feb. 27
$25 members/ $35 guests
For those who want to experience Marina City up close and personal, CBB member Brian Muir has arranged an incredible program of speakers and visuals. Speakers include:
Geoff Goldberg, son of Marina City architect Bertrand Goldberg
Topics to be covered by our speakers will include Goldberg's early work, the creation of the Marina City vision, and much more. The program will begin in a conference room at the House of Blues Hotel. A reception at the House of Blues Hotel will follow; a cash bar will be available at that function. A guided walking tour of the complex itself is in the planning stages, but arrangements are not yet final.
Please join CBB for this and other educational and fun events!
For more information and online registration and payment, visit
chicagobauhausbeyond.org What Goldberg intended Marina Towers to do was to compete with suburbia by giving people reasons to stay in the city; that goal was what dictated the unusual program, packed onto only three acres of stratospherically-priced Chicago waterfront property. Suburbia offered glimpses of nature; the round plan guaranteed every apartment a view. Suburbia had plenty of parking; the round shape made the parking decks on the lowest fifteen floors of each building easy to navigate. Suburbia offered autonomy; the towers gave each apartment its own heating and hot water system running off the central cores, so that residents would never be inconvenienced by a breakdown of a central system. Suburbia had shopping and services within easy reach; Marina Towers had them even closer.
The complex was a success from the beginning, even if some Chicagoans referred to the dual towers as “the corncobs”. Goldberg rather appreciated the joke, keeping a picture of two corncobs looming over Chicago in his office. The towers became emblematic of the city, and of financial success; living at Marina Towers was never cheap. At that, Bertrand Goldberg never forgot the essential democracy behind the teachings of the Bauhaus: the Raymond Hilliard Homes were public housing, embodying exactly the same principles the rich enjoyed at Marina Towers.
As the years went by, the Marina City Towers complex became a little less fashionable, with a decreased roster of services. By the Eighties, many people viewed it as another Sixties dream gone slightly awry. Fortunately, increased appreciation for Mid-Century Modernism began to turn the complex’s fortunes around. By the time of Bertrand Goldberg’s death in 1997, it was well on its way to becoming an updated version of what it had originally been intended to be. In one instance, a space created as a television studio had become a House of Blues™, a very desirable amenity for the young professionals who understood and appreciated Marina Towers.
In recent years, the towers have become an object of serious study. Bertrand Goldberg was extensively interviewed in 1992 for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project, contributing over 350 pages of transcripted material. Many architectural historians and university professors now include Marina Towers when they teach and write. At a grass-roots level, Marina Towers is part of Chicago walking tours and seminars held for architecture buffs, like the Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond program of talks and tours seen in the sidebar to this article.
In his later years, the architect contributed another massive mixed-use development to Chicago, his River City project of 1984-1987. It bears a distinct resemblance to Marina Towers; Goldberg was true to his principles to the end. Before Goldberg, there was never anything quite like Marina Towers. Today, a lot of architects look to his vision for inspiration, hoping they can do something that meets today’s needs as well as what Bertrand Goldberg was doing twenty and forty years ago.
SOURCES:
The Website of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project, www.artic.edu
The Website of Great Buildings Online, www.greatbuildings.com
The Website of Archinform, www.archinform.net
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