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Marina City, Chicago

River City, Chicago

Bertrand Goldberg (July 17, 1913–October 8, 1997) was an American architect, best known for the Marina City complex in Chicago, the tallest residential and concrete buildings in the world at the time of completion.

Goldberg was born in Chicago, Illinois, and trained at the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture (now part of Harvard University). In 1932 he moved to Germany to study at the Bauhaus, working in the office of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under Mies's assistant Bruno Walter. Following civil unrest in Berlin, Goldberg fled to Paris in 1933 and soon returned to Chicago, where he first worked for Keck and Keck, then opened his own architectural office.

Goldberg was known for innovative solutions, particularly for residential, institutional, and industrial design projects. One of Goldberg's first commissions, in 1938, was for the North Pole chain of ice cream shops. His ingenious design allowed the small shops to be disassembled, transported, and reassembled with little effort. Its flat roof was supported by tension wires from a single, illuminated column rising up through the shop's center; glass windows and a door formed a box below the roof.

Marina City under construction

His experimental plywood boxcars, demountable housing units for military use during and after World War II led him to seek unconventional forms through mundane materials such as plywood and concrete. Perhaps his best-known commission, Marina City in Chicago (1959-1964), incorporated prefab bathrooms into two striking multi-lobed columnar forms often described as "corn cobs". After the success of Marina City, he received many more large commissions for hospitals, schools, and other public institutional buildings, such as Prentice Women's Hospital for Northwestern University, the science complex for SUNY Stony Brook, and River City in Chicago.

During his career, Goldberg designed a rear-engine automobile, canvas houses, novelty furniture, prefabricated houses and mobile vaccine laboratories for the United States government, and collaborated on projects with his friend and fellow 'design scientist' R. Buckminster Fuller.

The Betrand Goldberg Papers are held in the Ryerson and Burnham Archives and the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago.

• Jay Pridmore, George A. Larson, Chicago Architecture and Design : Revised and expanded, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8109-5892-9.

• Oral history interview with Bertrand Goldberg

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