From the Archive: Bertrand Goldberg’s Humanist Architectural Vision

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s March 2008 issue.

Chicago-born architect Bertrand Goldberg worked and built around his hometown for the better part of seven decades, a regional pioneer in a brand of architecture that, in hindsight, was surprisingly prescient. A proponent of prefabrication amidst the giddy building boom of the late 1940s; of dense, teeming urban cores while many Americans sought the perceived refuge of the suburbs in the 1950s; of desirable, ennobling public housing in the face of the crippling projects of the 1960s; and of energy efficiency despite the exuberance of the postwar boom, Goldberg couched his design ethos not in aesthetics but in philosophy: He cast himself as a humanist, closer perhaps to Erasmus than Eames, Petrarch than Pelli.

Like a number of midcentury modernists, Goldberg rubbed elbows with the European architectural elite in his youth. After studying at Harvard, he spent two years at the Bauhaus in Berlin from 1932 to 1933. He worked briefly as an apprentice in the office of Mies van der Rohe in Germany, and later returned home to begin what would become a 60-plus-year career in Chicago by opening his own practice, Bertrand Goldberg Associates, in 1937.

From there Goldberg undertook a welter of projects: several residences built in the Bauhaus style, a portable ice-cream parlor fashioned in part out of the chassis of the truck that carried it, various stabs at furniture design. His Standard Houses, developments of prefabricated wartime housing, went up in the early ‘40s, but the apex of his single-family-home design came in 1952, with the Snyder House. Built on Shelter Island, New York, the long sleek residence juts across the beach and over the water. The prefabricated components of the house were modeled on the doomed plywood boxcars Goldberg built for homeowner John Snyder’s Pressed Steel Car Company.

"My favorite era of his work," says Geoffrey Goldberg, Bertrand’s son and fellow architect, "was the ’50s. Before that he was a very bright creative mind who couldn’t find a home. But with his big break with Marina City, the seven stars aligned and he found this whole new scale to work in." In Marina City the seemingly disparate threads of the charismatic Goldberg’s career coalesced into what would become not only his most successful building, but his most lasting architectural statement. "He was no longer just the individual architect, a notion that he was suspicious about all his career. He began working as a city planner, an investor, and an intellectual."

Completed in 1967, Marina City is a housing complex consisting of two 60-story residential towers, an office building, a marina on the Chicago River, a theater and television studio, and recreational space including a skating rink and bowling alley. Goldberg, who believed in vibrant, dense urban spaces, boasted that Marina City, which housed 635 people per square acre, was the densest development in the city.

Formally the building broke with the boxy skyscrapers that dominated Chicago’s skyline. Goldberg eschewed the post-and-beam constructions of his peers, creating two corncob-style towers whose structural support came from a reinforced-concrete shell. The small apartments radiated out like petals of a flower from the building’s core toward the expansive views of the city.

Marina City marked a shift away from self-contained projects toward considering the greater urban context—what’s good for a downtown and what’s good for the residents. Marina City was energy-efficient, promoted common spaces, and encouraged people to work near where they live and to engage with the center of Chicago. "That’s what my dad meant when he talked about humanism," says Geoffrey. "He wasn’t designing for the building industry or for one client. He was able to work on a philosophical level. He wasn’t interested in architecture in the narrow sense. He was trying to understand the whole person and the whole social condition."

After Marina City came the Raymond Hilliard Homes in 1966-two round towers to house elderly residents and two more curvilinear slabs for low-income families. Hospitals and a university followed, each imbued with the same humanism that pervaded his work. Goldberg designed hospitals around the nurse-patient relationship (which he felt was what really drives a hospital), privileging the sight lines between patients’ beds and nurses’ stations. Goldberg worked until his death in 1997, each project asking, and usually answering, the question so central to his work: Where are the people and what are we doing for them? 

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist. 

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