Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision
Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray
Princeton Architecture Press, June 2010, $35.00

“Those long hallways with scores of doors opening anonymously are inhuman. Each person should retain his own relation to the core. It should be the relation of the branch to the tree, rather than of the cell to the honeycomb.”

– Architect Bertrand Goldberg, explaining the humanist rationale behind the circular residential towers of Marina City in Chicago.

When it broke ground in 1960 at the corner of State Street and Dearborn Avenue, Marina City was hailed as a new model for affordable urban living, one that would lure city workers away from the suburbs. The riverfront complex covered one city block and also contained an office building, a theater, retail space and an even an ice-skating rink. Goldberg predicted that the mixed-use development would succeed by being a “two-shift city” that was active both day and night.

In Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision, Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray cover the story of the development’s design and construction in illuminating detail, while also delving into the equally fascinating and to date untold stories of the politics, financing and promotion behind what has become one of the most iconic modernist landmarks on the Chicago skyline.

Review and preview images after the break.

The first comprehensive history of the project in print,* Marjanovic and Ray’s study contextualizes Goldberg’s work in way that will engage readers not only from the fields of architecture and urban planning but also real estate and marketing.

Goldberg opened his own office in Chicago in 1937, just as the country was beginning to recover from the Great Depression. Born in Chicago in 1913, Goldberg studied briefly at the Bauhaus and with Mies van der Rohe and these early influences are reinterpreted through his own work, which emphasizes social ideals but formally moves away from what Goldberg called “the cult” of the right angle.

This is epitomized in Marina City’s two 65-story residential towers of structural concrete, whose circular plan resulted in petal-shaped apartments that all have outdoor space and equal access to the building’s core.

The complex was an unprecedented commission by the Building Service Employees International Union, a.k.a. “The Janitor’s Union,” in conjunction with the Chicago realtor Charles Swibel. The project would provide at least one hundred new janitorial jobs, but more importantly it was considered a forward-thinking use of union funds. As the authors state, “Marina City’s mixed use program showcased upward mobility—a stage for the janitors’ investment in a middle-class urban lifestyle that reflected the blue-collar empowerment of postwar America.”

Marjanovic and Ray carefully explain the complexities of financing the development amid civic and labor union politics, and reveal that Goldberg’s skill at presenting and marketing his work was crucial to the project’s progress. Responsible for a series of cleverly designed brochures as well as press releases, events, and dramatic project photography, Goldberg closely managed the public reception of the project, and by 1967 his ambitious urban vision had successfully become a reality: 2500 applications sat waiting for 896 apartments. It’s a testament to Goldberg’s vision that the petal-shaped apartments are still very much in demand today.

Left to right: Betrand Goldberg, William McFetridge of the Janitor’s Union, and developer Charles Swibel with Marina City model.

Marina City’s apartment towers were famously compared to upright corncobs by the Chicago Daily News.

In plan, a studio apartment is the equivalent of one petal, a one-bedroom one and a half petals, a two-bedroom two and a half petals.

Every apartment in Marina City has outdoor space.