Bertrand Goldberg, whose corncob-shaped twin towers in downtown are almost as much a symbol of Chicago as the historic old Water Tower and whose vision of thriving, densely populated cities helped trigger the revival now sweeping many of the nation’s downtowns, died Wednesday. He was 84 years old.
Once a student of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose right-angled, steel-and-glass buildings set the standard for architects worldwide in the post-World War II era, Mr. Goldberg broke with the master to celebrate cylinders, boldly sculpted in reinforced concrete. He considered boxy buildings dehumanizing, calling them “the idea of a man made in the image of a machine.”
But Mr. Goldberg’s significance transcended architecture. In the 1950s, when there was widespread pessimism about the future of cities as places to live, Mr. Goldberg posed a vital alternative with the five-building Marina City complex, which shared the twin distinction of having the world’s tallest reinforced concrete buildings and the world’s tallest apartment buildings when it was completed in the mid-1960s.
There can be no doubt Marina City helped pioneer the notion of a “city within a city” and inspired the revitalization now occurring in downtown Chicago and in other American cities.
Variously described over the years as corncobs, flower petals on a stem, refrigerator coils and radiators, Marina City still defines Chicago’s image on travel posters and postcards.
“Marina City will survive close scholarly appraisal well into the next century as a superb example of architectural plasticity as well as a multiple-use facility reflecting Goldberg’s concerns about urban amenities,” the late Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Paul Gapp, commented in 1991 when he ranked Marina City among Chicago’s 10 most significant postwar buildings.
Mr. Goldberg also was a revolutionary transformer of hospital layouts and a promoter of humane public housing. He was, in many respects, as distinctive as his architecture.
With his rumpled hair and simmering eyes, his tweed jackets and stylish shirts, and his courtly, genteel air _ now impish, now prickly _ Mr. Goldberg often seemed more of a poet than an architect. He was once described as a humanist whose medium happened to be architecture.
“We are still trying to find out what we can design that will invite people to form community,” he said in 1994. “We can’t force them to form communities, but we can invite them.”
He articulated the view that the denser a city is, the better, because only with a critical mass of people in proximity can society provide itself efficiently with such services as transportation and public safety.
A native Chicagoan who was known to many as “Bud,” Mr. Goldberg grew up in Hyde Park, went to local private schools, proceeded to Harvard University, then went to Germany’s famous Bauhaus School of Design, studying there with such giants as Mies.
