Marina City is more than just a postcard. With its picture on the front, it’s instantly identifiable as Chicago even to the postman in Kathmandu. Like the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, the recipient in Fiji knows in a split-second where his friend has landed.
And like those other structures, it has been an icon for decades. Over 60 years, in fact. Bertrand Goldberg’s complex of five buildings is mostly pictured looking up from Wacker Drive. But even through an aerial perspective, it still looks monumental though it’s now flanked by taller buildings. And when it first appeared in the early 1960s, it seemed remote, somewhat otherworldly and a bit futuristic.
But when it was new, the sooty area north of the river was filled with loft buildings for light industry. Additionally, some commercial structures and cheap hotels inhabited what was then the “Near North.” Consequently, Goldberg literally removed his gleaming masterwork with a fence-like office building separating Marina City from the dreary neighborhood. Its entrance plaza, called the “Bridge” level, physically disconnected from the street grid by ramps up from State and Dearborn.
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When I opened my downtown art gallery of museum-level architectural works at the end of 1998, I specialized at first in old architecture drawings: Mostly 19th and early 20th centuries to the Second World War. One collection I had acquired was the extensive holdings of the last successor firm to the Daniel Burnham architectural offices.
(Left) Daniel Burnham (1846-1912). |
In their storage rooms were heavy linen and paper rolls of some of Burnham’s most important 19th century buildings. And hiding in these construction documents were examples of the successor firms that evolved from his offices. Not only were there Burnham & Root and D.H. Burnham & Co. designs, but Jazz Age skyscrapers of his sons and Moderne retail buildings by the 1930s firm that followed.
Along with rare 18th century etchings, 19th century design drawings, and 20th century Art Deco photographs, the market here was wide open for these original works. But there was a hole after the war years.
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I soon filled it with industrial design drawings and the designs of Bertrand Goldberg: The design drawings because those for chairs, radios, and lamps were the best of the time; the Goldberg architectural drawings filled the same void in architecture.
(Left) San Diego Theatre in La Jolla, California, 1969. Bertrand Goldberg, architect; Henry Gould, delineator. |
But Marina City was different from the start. Bertrand Goldberg had briefly studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus but couldn’t quite follow the Miesian vocabulary. Instead of the steel and glass ethos and right-angled geometries he had learned, his architecture was much more biomorphic; more updated Louis Sullivan than Mies Modernism.
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For one thing, he was more convinced that concrete instead of steel was more of a parallel to natural forms. Sullivan’s buildings after his and Dankmar Adler’s Auditorium Building were more “organic” in that they appeared to grow out of the ground. Goldberg’s for the same reasons.
(Right) Rendering, circa 1985, of River City. |
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He was asked to speak frequently after the final Marina City renderings were first published. In 1959, one of his speeches at the Aspen Design Conference in Colorado addressed the cylindrical shapes of the two 60-story towers.
He explained that the round 35-foot cores help support the buildings and the 105-foot plan itself cut the wind resistance by more than half. He further gave an insight into his thinking that he didn’t see them as circular at all but that they resembled a great sunflower whose petals were the apartments.
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At Aspen, he also said, “I strongly feel that the shape of these buildings [has] a relationship of a tree to its branches, as compared with other types of cellular design, which apartment buildings have taken, where each apartment has the relationship of beehive and the cell.”
(Left) Bertrand Goldberg with a model of an early design of River City. |
This is clearly the nature-based Louis Sullivan concept of architecture. Having studied the histories of the world’s great architects over the years, I clearly noticed this distinction.
I had written frequently about the 19th century breakthrough here of what at the time was called the “Commercial Style.” Because of the marshy soil and deep location of limestone bedrock in the region, Chicago architects were challenged to find a way for buildings to rise to new heights more affordably yet stay stable.
In 1882, the first of the bigger buildings figuratively “floated” on concrete and woven iron railroad rail pads that didn’t puncture the shallow hardpan clay layer. Soon, the developers asked architects to provide bigger windows for sunnier offices.
Walls were freed from bearing the heavy loads of the thick piers of brick, and exteriors became mere “curtains” of sheets of glass and thin terra cotta panels hung onto steel skeletons. America’s thirst for oil not only provided the innovation to mechanically dig deep holes, it led the construction industry to invent caissons in the 1890s to reach down to that underlying bedrock.
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It all started the concept of seeing the structure itself as beautiful. And except for the balcony railings, Marina City was all structure.
(Left) Plan, circa 1960, of a Marina City residential floor. |
Nearing the end of 2004, I roughed out my exhibition schedule for 2005 and decided to focus a show on one architect, Bertrand Goldberg. Previous to this, Frank Lloyd Wright had been the only single architect who was worthy of this lens.
It had long been apparent to me and the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago that along with Daniel Burnham, Goldberg and Mies van der Rohe had also been the most influential to the look of Chicago and the museum wanted to add both to their architectural collection.
Goldberg’s son, Geoff, then pushed me into his direction when he asked my advice on what to do with the remainder of the office drawings and giant-format photographs the Art Institute didn’t have room to archive.
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I opened “Bertrand Goldberg: The Shape of Space” on January 14, 2005, for a two-month run. Quite the contrast from my previous exhibition of 18th century etchings of Roman ruins.
(Right) Part of the Goldberg exhibition at ArchiTech Gallery in 2005. |
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However, the Art Institute only needed one of everything for their collection. The department called Geoff about their need to send things back and he told them to transport them to me. With those museum items, my Goldberg exhibition showed the full roll of Marina City blueline prints and other office remnants of their most famous project.
With this last-minute addition of hand-made architectural models and the Marina City rolls, the “Shape of Space” show then became the most comprehensive commercial Goldberg exhibition to have ever occurred.
In March of 2005, I was asked to speak at Marina City about Goldberg’s ideas on architecture and get a special tour. When writing my notes beforehand, it occurred to me that Marina City’s very construction was probably the culmination of the renamed “Chicago School of Architecture.”
It was thought to have been replaced by the Classical constructions influenced by the Rome-scaled 1893 World’s Fair, “The Great Columbian Exposition.” But those looks simply clothed skeletons of steel invented in Chicago in the 1880s.
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The Marina City symposium tour and a study of the complex’s working drawings from the gallery show granted me the deep-dive into the buildings’ details few people ever experienced. I was shown one of the original apartments, and was granted extensive balcony access, tours of boat slips, and walks on the rooftops.
(Left) 1963 photograph of Marina City by Orlando Cabanban. |
All these elements were illustrated in the Art Institute’s returns. And now I could see for myself how stunning the light and views from wall-to-wall windows were in the apartments; How quiet a circular hallway made each apartment entrance.
Though I knew from the blueprints how close the towers were to each other, just whispering to a resident standing on the opposite balcony mere feet away was truly amazing. And the rooftop view from the East Tower spread all of Downtown Chicago at my feet.
During the Summer of 2009, I prepared an exhibition of “Marina City.” I had delved that year into Mid-Century Modernism with shows of the chair, lamp, and radio designs and decided on one group of buildings to equal the other drawings in dynamics.
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The earlier Bertrand Goldberg exhibition had gone well, and I had come into possession of his 1995 designs for the conversion of the theatre into the “House of Blues.” Since the riverfront skyscrapers had assumed mythic status by then, it would be the only complex with presence enough to match the 1950s drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright I planned to close out the year.
(Right) 1995 plan of main floor of theater building. |
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The Marina City neighborhood has lately become “River North” and the epicenter of busy tourist hotels, expensive restaurants, and chic nightclubs. More than a neighborhood, actually, its many blocks reach from the Chicago River to the “Gold Coast.” Now completely within an attractive and safe area, and full of the street life Marina City turned its back on decades ago, the complex’s architecture is sure to change.
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My gallery within River North’s arts district closed its doors several years ago. After I had sold all the rest of my D.H. Burnham collection to the Burnham Library of the Art Institute, I was somewhat amused that their Department of Architecture then asked me for every scrap I had of Marina City and Bertrand Goldberg for their collection and private offices.
(Left) Marina City exhibit at ArchiTech Gallery in 2009. |
For those who must pigeon-hole everything into categories, Marina City probably fits within the “Baroque Modernism” style of architecture. Like the Sydney Opera House or the entire city of Brasilia, any deviations from the right-angle, steel and glass vocabularies are first met with derision. Then after a few years, delight.
We’ll just call Marina City the world’s largest sculpture.
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