Thinking Twice

It always pays to think twice. After the last post I decided to do some more digging on Bertrand Goldberg's work. Beauty is as beauty does, in architecture as in other things.

I find that Goldberg's work is, in fact, all the more interesting because aspects of it are difficult to assess, maybe even disturbing.

Perhaps most famous among his designs is Marina City, a set of towers nicknamed by some Chicago wags as The Corn Cobs. Completed in 1964, Marina City was a largely successful attempt to draw residents back to the city core from the 'burbs and to create a full-service, 24-hour neighborhood therein (complete with marina facilities and boat locks).

Unveiled to great acclaim, Marina City was viewed as a success from both an architectural and city planning perspective until the 1970s, when it fell on hard times and gained a reputation as another 1960s experiment gone wrong.

In its heyday, here is what Goldberg himself had to say:

This is Marina City. Here in Marina City, we have completely eliminated the concept of the street. We have created a plaza in the best European classical sense of the city square, and on the plaza we have erected five interrelated buildings.

The plaza in itself marks the disappearance of the corridor street. The plaza becomes the open platform on which automobiles and people, alternately passengers and pedestrians can wander as they choose. Also, in terms of space here in Marina City, we have done what few cathedrals in Europe are able to do. We have reached out for a piece of vertical space, which is so thrilling to men everywhere.

Well. Yes. Men do rather seem preoccupied with, uh, vertical space. With all due respect.

Here's what the online magazine Jetsetmodern.com has to say about Marina City:

Since the Sixties, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City Towers have been an iconic part of Chicago’s skyline. Millions of readers, moviegoers, and TV-watchers know the twin buildings mean “Chicago”, even when they don’t have a clue what the towers are or how they came to be. Conceived as a “city within a city”, the Marina Towers complex has been through four distinct stages in its history: promise, acclaim, disrepute, and renaissance.

The towers are arguably more stylistically rooted in the Sixties than any other buildings in America; many onlookers misinterpret them as a grandiose, unnecessary realization of the cartooned architecture seen in the “Jetsons” TV show. They could not be more wrong: Goldberg’s complex has much to teach us today. An early attempt to stem the urban exodus to the suburbs, Marina Towers offers a self-contained world: there is little need for residents to leave it. Planned with a theater, restaurant, bowling alley, health club, ice-skating rink, grocery store, bank, and parking garage, the complex both concealed and revealed a secret heritage.

What Goldberg intended Marina Towers to do was to compete with suburbia by giving people reasons to stay in the city; that goal was what dictated the unusual program, packed onto only three acres of stratospherically-priced Chicago waterfront property. Suburbia offered glimpses of nature; the round plan guaranteed every apartment a view. Suburbia had plenty of parking; the round shape made the parking decks on the lowest fifteen floors of each building easy to navigate. Suburbia offered autonomy; the towers gave each apartment its own heating and hot water system running off the central cores, so that residents would never be inconvenienced by a breakdown of a central system. Suburbia had shopping and services within easy reach; Marina Towers had them even closer.

categories: architecture thought