Marina City’s theatrical flourish

“We have traditionally designed theaters like a funnel, with the small end of the funnel being the stage and the large end, the area in which you seat people. The Marina City theater is exactly the opposite. You sit in the small end of the funnel and are constantly expanding your spatial experience outward and upward to a point where you lose yourself in a kind of limbo of space.”
– Bertrand Goldberg, 1963

Bertrand Goldberg was a fan of the arts. He would sometimes fly to New York for an opening night and then fly back to Chicago. He had high hopes for his theater building on the Dearborn Street side of Marina City. It would be designed for live, modern theater “for the next generation,” he said in an interview, and have a state-of-the-art sound system. He was hoping the Goodman Theatre, a prominent regional theater company in Chicago, could be lured to Marina City.

(Left) Early design of the theater building at Marina City. Drawn for Bertrand Goldberg Associates, the artist has signed his or her name as “Branham.” Image provided by The Art Institute of Chicago.

(Right) Model of an early, steeper concept of the theater building.

(Left) Construction of Marina City’s theater building in May 1963 from the northwest corner of the site. West tower at right. Portland Cement Association.

He compared the building to the physical structure of an arm. “Where the exterior concrete frame of the theater touches the ground, we have the elbow. At the extreme cantilevered reaching end, we have the hand. And high up, we have the shoulder. The roof is slung by means of catenary [curved] cables between the hand and the shoulder. The seats – the gallery – is supported along the concrete arm itself.”

Goldberg imagined stages within the stage, overhead stages, sloping stages, and stages behind the audience. “I don’t think it is wrong to make people turn their seat to see something as they would turn on the street. At Marina City, we are in need of spectacle theater.”

The saddle-shaped building was constructed between 1963 and 1968 using space frames, arched beams, and sprayed concrete. It was covered in lead sheathing that functioned as a sound deadening material.

(Left) Early in the construction of Marina City’s theater building in 1963 from the 1985 book Dans La Ville.

(Right) Workers install lead roof of theater building in 1965.

(Left) Close view of theater building lobby from northeast corner of building. In lower left frame, an escalator is visible, inside the lobby, which led to the lower level of the commercial platform. The parking cashier station can be seen at right. Also visible are three paintings, commissioned by Bertrand Goldberg, by Victor Vasarely, a Hungarian-French artist.

Besides the main entrance on the east side, there was an entrance, no longer there, on the west side near the Dearborn Street Bridge. It led to an exhibition space named McFetridge Hall in honor of William L. McFetridge, whose labor union financed the development of Marina City.

Written by Steven Dahlman
Presented for nonprofit educational purposes

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