Bertrand Goldberg

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

Goldberg was born in Chicago, and trained at the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture (now part of Harvard University). At age eighteen, in 1932, he went to Germany to study at the Bauhaus, working in the small office of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Following civil unrest in Berlin, Goldberg fled to Paris in 1933 and soon returned to Chicago, where he first worked for modernist architects Keck and Keck, Paul Schweikher, and Howard Fisher. Goldberg opened his own architectural office in Chicago in 1937.

Goldberg was known for innovative structural solutions to complex problems, 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.

Goldberg's 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 (1961–1964), incorporated many different functions into a mixed use complex of five buildings. The two sixty-story towers are on the river's edge, and are well known Chicago features, with striking multi-lobed columnar forms often described as "corn cobs". In addition to the towers, comprising apartments and parking, there was a complex pattern of activities that were incorporated into the original design, including an office building, theater, public pedestrian plaza, an active rail line, a marina, an ice skating rink, and a bowling alley. Much of the complex has evolved and changed over time, and the pattern of activities has shifted significantly, but with only minor changes to Goldberg's design. The office building is now a hotel, and the theater is now the Chicago House of Blues. The rail line has since been abandoned, and the skating rink has been covered by a later addition housing a steakhouse.

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