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Architect: Bertrand Goldberg Assignment 4 - Arc-551 – February 28, 2015 - Ken Boeser

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Architect: Bertrand Goldberg Assignment 4 - Arc-551 – February 28, 2015 - Ken Boeser Marina City (1959 – 1964) Marina City 300 N State St Chicago, IL 60611 Architect: Bertrand Goldberg Assignment 4 - Arc-551 – February 28, 2015 - Ken Boeser Bertrand Goldberg. Marina City, Chicago, IL, perspective sketch (detail), 1985. The Art Institute of Chicago, Archive of Bertrand Goldberg, gifted by his children through his estate, RX23664/75.57. Index Page 1 Cover Page 2 Index Page 3 Architect - Bertrand Goldberg (July 17, 1913–October 8, 1997) About Bertrand Goldberg Page 4 North Pole Ice Cream (Circa. 1938) “Known for his commitment to socially progressive design in large- Page 5 Unicel (Circa. 1949 - 1952) scale residential and institutional projects, Goldberg's distinctive work Page 6 UniShelter (Circa. 1952) often juxtaposed fluid, organic shapes against the rectilinear forms Page 7 Marina City (1959-1964) popularized after World War II. His work can be seen in such noted Page 8 Slip Form Construction and Tower Cranes buildings as Marina City and River City in Chicago, and in hospitals Page 9 Marina City (continued) across the United States…. from his early work in prefabrication, Page 10 Marina City (continued) through the leisure projects of the 1950s, to the skyscrapers of the Page 11 Marina City (continued) 1980s—all bound together by his belief in architecture's obligation to Page 12 Marina City (continued) improve the state of the human condition and the conviction that Page 13 Marina City (continued) urbanism was the best avenue to that end.” Page 14 Marina City (Summary) Quote from Website: http://bertrandgoldberg.org/ Page 15 Other Urban Design projects by Goldberg - River City, Chicago, Illinois Page 16 Other Urban Design projects by Goldberg - River City II, Chicago, Illinois From Bertrand Goldberg Page 17 Other Urban Design projects by Goldberg – Night World, Orlando, Florida “My message, I think, is much more important either than myself Page 18 Other High Rise Tower project by Goldberg personally, or than the quick identification as the round-building • Good Samaritan Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona architect. I am talking about the performance of people in a social • Providence Hospital, Mobile, Alabama system, about the performance of people in the city.” Page 19 Acknowledgements Quote from Bertrand Goldberg, Date Unknown. Page 20 Recommended Readings and Links All images taken from http://bertrandgoldberg.org/ 2 Bertrand Goldberg (July 17, 1913–October 8, 1997) Timeline: 1913 Born in Chicago Illinois 1930-1932 Attended the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture (now part of Harvard University). 1932-1933 Goldberg travels to Berlin, Germany to study at the Bauhaus, where he met and worked with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 1933 (The Reichstag passes the Enabling Act making Adolf Hitler Dictator of Germany). Bauhaus closes following civil unrest. Goldberg fled to Paris. 1933-1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Chicago Fair. 1933-1936 Goldberg returned to Chicago. Attends Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago, where he first worked for modernist architects Keck and Keck, Paul Schweikher, and Howard Fisher and a tutorial with engineer Frank Nydam. 1937 The New Bauhaus is opened in Chicago with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe returning to Chicago. 1937 Goldberg opened his own architectural office in Chicago 1938 Earliest Commissions - North Pole chain of ice cream shops. His design allowed small shops to be disassembled, transported, and reassembled w/ minimal effort. 1939-1943 Establishes Standard Houses in Maryland and Illinois with fellow architect Gilmor Black developing prefabricated homes 1939-1945 World War II – Goldberg experiments in the use of plywood boxcars, demountable housing units for military use during and after World War II, leading him to seek unconventional forms through mundane materials such as plywood and concrete. 1946 Establishes Standard Fabrication Co. developing prefabricated bathrooms. 1949-1953 Design consultant for the Pressed Steel Car Company and developed the Unicel plywood boxcar and an innovative housing project called Unishelter. 1950’s Goldberg worked with Arthur Rubloff to market privately built public housing, leading to building Drexel Home and Gardens project. 1959-1964 Perhaps his best known commission, Marina City in Chicago, incorporates many different functions into a mixed use complex of five buildings. 1964-1997 Continued successful career. After the success of Marina City, Goldberg moved his work to focus on larger scale social, planning, and engineering issues, and proposed many progressive urban projects, at a time when the future of urban growth and development in the United States was not always clear. Accomplishments: Innovative structural solutions to complex problems, particularly for residential, institutional, and industrial design projects. Wrote extensively on urban issues and other historical and cultural issues. Known as an entrepreneur and a “Design-Scientist”. Besides his many architectural accomplishments, Goldberg also designed: • A rear-engine automobile and Furniture design • Prefabricated houses, bathrooms and Canvas houses • Designed mobile vaccine laboratories for the United States government • Designed mobile Gun Crate and Mobile Delousing Unit for the Board of Economic Warfare Collaborations: He collaborated on some projects with his friend and fellow 'design scientist' R. Buckminster Fuller, as well as other modernists. He also was friends with Josef Albers, who taught him at the Bauhaus. In the late 1930s, Goldberg was present at the famous meeting of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Taliesin. Awards: The recipient of numerous awards, his work was the subject of many exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Most Notable awards include being elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1966, and was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1985. Bertrand Goldberg at the Marina City construction site, October 13, 1961. Exhibits: Photo from The Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson & 3 The Bertrand Goldberg Archive is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. Burnham Libraries; The Art Institute of Chicago. North Pole Ice Cream (Circa. 1938) Bertrand Goldberg - Architect, Modernist, “Design Scientist”, Entrepreneur, Business Man. Problem: Create a mobile Ice Cream Store that could be quickly disassembled, transported and reassembled easily. Solution: The North Pole ice cream store is one of Goldberg's earliest architectural / industrial design projects. “The North Pole mobile ice cream store was a building on wheels. The entire store was portable and was designed to sell ice cream in Chicago in the summer and Florida in the winter. Its glass walls and cantilevered roof were suspended from a mast anchored to a truck chassis, a part of the building. Goldberg contemplated creating a series of these stores to be served by a "mother-truck" where ice cream would be manufactured. Stores could be installed in a parking lot in a downtown area in the north of the United States during the summertime, and move south during winter. The inventive little building was influenced by Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, which featured a similar roofing system. Goldberg showed the design to General Wood, the President of the Sears Roebuck Company, who, as Goldberg states in his Oral History, "was very interested in it as a concept for Sears Roebuck for stores that could be erected quickly in new industrial areas… He became sort of interested in it but nothing ever happened." As stated by Goldberg in his Oral History, "the concept of a tension supported roof ---of a roof supported by hanging was something which obviously I hadn't designed or invented - but the awareness of it certainly opened up a new horizon for design...You could get a building that was suddenly open at its edges rather than closed at its edges." Information and Quote taken from http://bertrandgoldberg.org/ “The mobile ice cream station, The North Pole, it was meant to wander around. The form of it conformed to road requirements, maximum width and so on.” Quote from Bertrand Goldberg, Date Unknown. http://bertrandgoldberg.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/nor4-553x400.jpg http://bertrandgoldberg.org/wp- http://bertrandgoldberg.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/nor5-506x400.jpg content/uploads/2011/07/nor2.jpg 4 Unicel (Circa. 1949 - 1952) Bertrand Goldberg - Architect, Modernist, “Design Scientist”, Entrepreneur, Business Man. Problem: Because of a steel shortage following WWII, the challenge was to design a rail car that did not rely on steel. Solution: Unicel is another of Goldberg's industrial design projects: the design was for a plywood prefabricated boxcar. “The plywood boxcar built on earlier exploration in panel construction in the Standard Houses, and when built as a "tube" had the strength of a steel boxcar but was built mostly of wood. Goldberg's monolithic tube-like structure of stressed skin-plywood, dubbed "Unicel" for unit-cellular, made by placing layers of strong plywood grain against grain and laminating them with special plastics under heat. Constructed as a single unit, it was quite strong. The design was patented in both the US and in Canada. Introduction of the Unicel Prefab Freight Car was done with much fanfare with unveilings at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The display booth for the Unicel, also designed by Goldberg, featured a photomontage
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