Bertrand Goldberg Overview

When Bertrand Goldberg returned to his native Chicago in 1936 the city was in the midst of an architectural revolution. The emergence of steel-frame architecture in the final years of the previous century had ushered in a generation of soaring buildings,... [more]

When Bertrand Goldberg returned to his native Chicago in 1936 the city was in the midst of an architectural revolution. The emergence of steel-frame architecture in the final years of the previous century had ushered in a generation of soaring buildings, earning Chicago a reputation for architectural daredevilry and innovation. In addition to his studies at the Cambridge School of Architecture (now part of Harvard University), Goldberg had joined up with the Bauhaus movement in Germany. Goldberg, accompanied by a more established Bauhaus architect, Mies van der Rohe, moved to Chicago in the 1930s. Although many histories obscure Goldberg in the monumental shadow of van der Rohe’s iconic modernism, Goldberg was a pioneer in his own right. He married Bauhaus ideology with structural and spatial innovation decisively. Increased efficiency, repeating geometric forms, and multi-purpose buildings became Goldberg's visual signature. Unlike many others in the Bauhaus school, Goldberg was partial to organic shapes: cloverleafs, rounded rooms deemed "pods" or "petals", and fluid lines that stretched the limits of structural engineering. Many of Goldberg's early projects centered on furniture and prefabricated mobile units. He designed mobile penicillin laboratories, collapsible and temporary housing, prefabricated units for travel and the developing world; these were cost-effective and efficient structures that could be mass produced for clients including the U.S. government. After World War II, the face of American cities, Chicago included, began to change: returning soldiers bought new single family homes in the suburbs, and urban centers lost population. Goldberg saw white flight as an opportunity to grow the density of urban centers by creating interdependencies between businesses and services. Marina City, a development on the north side of the Chicago River, was his innovative riposte to urban depopulation. In Marina City, Goldberg combined apartment units with spaces for communal activity: athletic and recreational facilities, restaurants, river-level docks for 700 boats, retail shops, and entertainment. The complex was comprised of three primary buildings: two scalloped, cylindrical residential buildings and a large rectangular office building. Secondary buildings included a saddle-shaped performance hall (now the House of Blues), a skating rink, and several smaller outbuildings. Even before the complex was completed, it included a florist, TV station, travel agency and drug store, among other amenities. Goldberg shunned single-purpose zoning and sought instead to foster density and variety as necessary components of urban living. Combined, the towers held nearly 900 apartments, and parking space for an equal number of cars, radiating from a structural core that efficiently carried and distributed utilities like electricity, water, and phone lines. Between 1967, when Marina City was completed, and 1997, Bertrand Goldberg Associates built nine hospitals and medical centers. These constructions used the same principles of design as Marina City: utilities were routed through a central stem or core, and clover or petal shaped units were intended to centralize the service needs of hospital patients and doctors. His distinctive cloverleaf pattern, seen in his hospitals in Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, and Phoenix, was intended to reduce the distance between essential services and patients. But Goldberg was not solely interested in reconciling complexity with functionality; curved walls and windows lent intimacy and personality to his medical centers, unlike the industrial, repetitive hallways of contemporary medical centers and apartment complexes. Goldberg's designs radically reoriented architectural approaches to care and community, but they were not faultless. His designs are often compared to R. Buckminster Fuller’s occasionally awkward futurisms; their distinctive forms can impose restrictive spatial parameters. The petal-shaped apartments and clover leaf units were difficult to furnish, and even more frustrating to update or repurpose. [show less]