Marina City

 

CASE STUDY- 2 MARINA TOWERS.

Architect Bertrand Goldberg

 

Location Chicago, Illinois Date 1959 to 1964 Building Type mixed use-multifamily use-multifamily housing, housing, offices, offices, parking Construction System concrete Climate temperate Context urban Style Modern

 

Notes Twin round towers.

Marina City

"Marina City, in 1959, is a thirty-six-million- dollar project built on only three acres of land in the heart of Chicago's Loop. A dramatic landmark in the Chicago skyline, it culminated thirty years of thought and development for Goldberg. Each of the twin, sixty-story towers had four hundred and fifty apartments in its upper two-thirds, with the lower third a continuous parking ramp that spirals upwards, accommodating accommodating four hundred and fifty automobiles. Since the residential level starts at the twenty-first story, magnificent views of the city are enjoyed from every ev ery apartment. The towers are as popular with Chicagoans Chicagoans as the 'corn on the cob' they t hey are caricatured as in Goldberg's office. "For many years Goldberg had felt there were advantages in the use of circular forms: the aerodynamic properties in a cylindrical high-rise structure; the structural equidistance from the center, and therefore uniform function of all parts; the absence of special corner conditions; and the creation of centrifugal or 'kinetic' spaces resulting from non-parallel walls. The towers derive much of  their rigidity from the 35-foot-diameter cylindrical core that houses each building's services and 

 

 

utilities like a vertical street. Service spaces in apartments were grouped toward this core, giving living areas the light and view. The construction of the core preceded that of the floors, providing a rising foundation for the erection crane, thereby saving many working days. The project is all-electric, with heat and hot water individually produced in each apartment. "The other elements of the 'city within a city' are a sixteen-story office building; a one- thousandseven-hundred-and-fifty-seat seven-hundred -and-fifty-seat theater and a seven-hundred-seat auditorium; stores, restaurants, bowling alleys; a gymnasium, swimming pool and skating rink; a marina for seven hundred small craft; and a sculpture garden at the base of the towersall overlooking the Chicago River. Built for an economical ten to twelve dollars a square foot, Marina City is Goldberg's response to the urgencies of  urban redevelopment...."