Prior to 1959, Bertrand Goldberg’s experience with large housing projects was modest but he stood out as versatile and innovative.

Born in Chicago in 1913, Goldberg attended what is now Harvard University, then at age 18 he studied at the famed Bauhaus art school in Berlin for a year, at one time working in the office of legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Returning to Chicago in 1933, he worked for three architecture firms before opening his own office in 1937. He designed single-family homes, an ice cream shop, and a gasoline station.

He spent 15 years in the world of prefabricated structures. From 1937 to 1952, Goldberg designed prefabricated houses, a prefabricated freight car, and a prefabricated bathroom. The biggest advantage to building a structure and shipping it to a site ready to use was lower cost. Imaginative design was not a priority.

On September 24, 1939, a small neighborhood of five prefabricated five-room model homes designed by Goldberg opened in Lafayette, Indiana, and by the end of the day each had sold for $2,995, the equivalent of $50,913 today.

Goldberg worked on larger prefabricated housing projects but in 1942, while meeting with a prospective client in Virginia, a paper factory exploded, killing 20 people and injuring the 29-year-old architect. By the time he recovered more than a year later, his career had taken another path.

Young architect introduces city dwellers to indoor plumbing

With the end of World War II, Goldberg turned to urban architectural problems. One of those problems was that many houses in the city did not have indoor plumbing. He designed a $495 bathroom, complete with bathtub, shower, sink, toilet, and storage, which could be installed in any older home.

When he approached the Pressed Steel Car Company about building the prefab bathroom on a larger scale, it led to Goldberg’s next opportunity. Company president John Snyder asked Goldberg to design a new freight car built of laminated plywood, replacing steel that was still in short supply after the war. Although Goldberg’s Unicel Prefab Freight Car (left) was lighter and less expensive than steel, pressure from the steel industry kept it from catching on. It did, however, inspire Unishelter, a Unicel with bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, windows, and doors that Goldberg thought of as “a large brick that could be arranged in different configurations to serve different purposes.” A Unishelter could be shipped out in less than a week and three connected modules cost $7,700, equal to $67,637 today. Many were sold to the United States Government for an Army post in Georgia and more were on the way but a severe budget cut closed the Unishelter plant in 1954.

Soon, Goldberg (right, photographed in 1952) would give up on designing single-family homes and focus exclusively on large multi-family housing developments. Drexel Home and Gardens – 64 planned, low-cost houses completed in 1955 – won awards from Progressive Architecture and Architectural Forum magazines. After that came a recreation center in Mobile, Alabama, Astor Tower in Chicago, and the West Palm Beach Auditorium in Florida. He was hired by Charles R. Swibel in 1959 and one of the reasons why, according to Swibel’s son, was because Goldberg was Jewish. “My father had a very strong sense of Jewish identity,” said Howard Swibel in 2008. “He did not consider himself an artist. And he heard there was a young architect who was Jewish, and he was going to give an opportunity to a Jewish kid.”

1959 would start with a general idea of the project. Bertrand Goldberg Associates knew it was on a mission to get people to invest in Chicago’s center. Making downtown more habitable, they believed, would not only have economic benefits but it would make people happy.

There were no plans. There was no financing. The project had no name. And a site had not been selected. But as the decade wound down, Marina City would start to take shape.