By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine Chicago, October 1997

The death of every of the world’s most important intellects admonishes.

So, it was today, that the esteemed Chicago architect, Bertrand Goldberg has passed into a greater eternity.

Goldberg was everything that a great architect could and should be: a visionary, humanist, cultured intellectual, and on the Left.

There was something of a revolutionary about this architect known for his innovative structural solutions to complex problems particularly for residential, institutional, and industrial design projects.

During his unique career, Goldberg designed a rear-engine automobile, canvas houses, unique furniture, prefabricated houses, and mobile vaccine laboratories for the United States government.

He collaborated on some projects with his friend, R. Buckminster Fuller, as well as other modernists.

Goldberg was born in Chicago in 1913 and trained at the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture (now part of Harvard University).

In 1932, at the early age of eighteen, he ventured off to Germany to study at the avant-garde Bauhaus, working in the small office of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Following Nazi unrest in Berlin, Goldberg fled to Paris in 1933 and soon returned to Chicago, where he first worked for architects Keck and Keck, Paul Schweikher, and Howard Fisher.

Goldberg opened his own architectural office in Chicago in 1937. One of Goldberg’s first commissions, in 1938, was for the North Pole chain of ice cream shops.

His ingenious design allowed the small shops to be disassembled, transported, and reassembled with very little effort.

Their flat roofs were supported by tension wires from a single, illuminated column rising up through the shop’s center; glass windows and a door formed a box below the roof.

During the 1940s and 50s, Goldberg’s experimental plywood boxcars, demountable housing units for military use during and after World War II led him to seek unconventional forms through mundane materials such as plywood and concrete.

For years he tried to have his plywood furniture from that period mass-produced and often asked for my help and advice to locate a manufacturer to do so.

Sadly, that distinct furniture, designed much the same as Aalto or Eames, was never put into production.

No American manufacturer had the vision or the foresight to see the simple genius in Goldberg’s marvelous plywood designs.

There was something so very specifically socialist about his architecture, though some critics found it to be too over-powering.

He was progressive in his ideas about the ways people should live and work and interact.

His design and urban philosophies evolved into a kind of complex social engineering that maybe looked rigid and uncomfortable, but certainly worked and was most unconventional for his time.

He was a civic leader that promoted mixed-use building types at a time when city centers in the 1960s through most of the 90s, such as Chicago, became a lifeless desert after workers fled their offices and off to the suburbs.

He advocated for the healthy mixed-use of residential and working environments to insure that a city doesn’t die after 6PM.

That idea has flourished after Goldberg’s time; and today, the City of Chicago is vibrant, robust, and full of energy almost 24-7.

His then unique vision and urban idealism resulted in the design of Marina City (1959-1964), which was Goldberg’s major architectural triumph.

The complex incorporated many different functions into a mixed-use building, divided into two, twin residential sixty-story towers on the Chicago River edge.

Dubbed the “corn cobs,” Marina City was comprised of apartments and parking with a pattern of activities that included an office building, theater, public pedestrian plaza, an active rail line, a marina, an ice-skating rink, and a bowling alley.

For decades, Marina City was the tallest residential concrete building in the world from the time of completion and the twin towers were the main architectural symbol of City of Chicago through the 1990s.

What I loved most about Goldberg is that he had the courage to stand up to Mies and the other Chicago modernists, breaking away from the rectangular irregularities of the box, in favor of an architecture that was organic (in a sense), fluid, and above all else, curved.

While other modernists from that generation produced the most abysmal social housing projects, Cabrini Green, and others, Goldberg’s unique social vision led to the development of the successful Hilliard Homes for public housing that had less violence, more social vitality, a real neighborhood, and a higher standard of social equality.

In addition to an architectural genius and visionary, Goldberg was also a practical businessman; and above all else, Chicago’s leading architect intellect and bon vivant—a sociable person with the utmost cultivated and refined tastes.

Married to his wife, Nancy, the Goldbergs threw the best parties in Chicago in the 1980s to the present where intellectuals would congregate at their house on Astor Street or Maxim’s de Paris, a Goldberg-designed Art Nouveau replica of the famous Parisian restaurant by Louis Marnez.

He had the most remarkable collection of Pre-Columbian art and an incredible eye for contemporary art.

Nancy, too, was an extraordinary intellect, the daughter from the famed Chicago Florsheim family.

I would often be invited to attend art dinners and happenings at her painter mother’s loft (Lillian Florsheim) at Tree Studios.

Goldberg was a kind, soft, and generous soul.

But he wielded absolute authority in everything he did and ruled in the most totalitarian way when it came to engineering and detail that brought architectural perfection.

Here, too, I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Bertrand Goldberg.

As a young, 23-year-old journalist working in Chicago as a critic for the art newspaper, The New Art Examiner, one day Goldberg read my article that compared I.M Pei’s new National Gallery in Washington, D.C. to Centre Georges Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers stating Centre Pompidou as a radical art museum while the Pei building was “an airport.”

So impressed by my work and criticism, Goldberg whispered into the ear of Jim Hoge, then publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, that I would be the new aspiring American architecture critic.

A week later, Hoge hired me on as the newspaper’s official architecture critic.

During those years, Goldberg would often phone me up and would drive over in his Citroën to excitedly whisk me away to his office to show me his latest project; and then, we would lunch together and discuss everything from Ledoux to Baudelaire.

Goldberg later told the Chicago Tribune: “Christian is a strange combination of architectural historian, urban moralist and urban philosopher.”

At the end of this illustrious career, Goldberg had to face every living architect’s worst nightmare: the wrecking ball.

The monuments of yet another genius architect destined to rubble.

He would call on his legions of devoted followers: writers, poets, critics, artists, philosophers—the people least unequipped and lacking in any persuasive value—to launch public campaigns to save his buildings.

I contributed to many of these causes, particularly the fight to save Marina City from alterations; and later, Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center in the Downtown Chicago campus of Northwestern University, which was demolished shortly before he died.

No matter if some of his key works were lost, as a radical utopian of architecture and a true humanist, his legacy in Chicago remains in a brilliant career with his innovative design ideas for an urbanism and an architecture importantly intended to improve a society that will never disappear.

Copyright© 2015 Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.

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