Amazing to see some snippets from the Bertrand Goldberg archive with his son, Geoff - from prefab bathroom pods to clover-leaf hospitals, portable ice cream pavilions and pressed steel freight car homes - as well as Geoff’s 3D-printed models of some of his father’s unrealised structural experiments. Thanks again to @ikergil for the connection!
Huge thanks to @ikergil for the incredible tour of Marina City, Bertrand Goldberg’s 1964 vision of mixed use urban living in a pair of 65-storey corn cobs in downtown Chicago. The complex was designed with an office, saddle-shaped auditorium, ice rink and marina for pleasure craft, with 450 apartments in each tower perched atop 19-storey spiralling parking ramps. Bathrooms came equipped with tubs and toilets in baby blue, yellow or pink, with similarly colourful kitchen combos (pics here of several immaculate restorations by Gil’s @mas.studio.chicago ) 🍭 The tallest residential buildings in the world at the time - and a gigantic leap in scale for Goldberg - the project helped to kickstart the renaissance of America’s inner cities 🌽💫
Strangely underwhelming to finally visit the Robie House (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1909), having had a poster of the famous perspective drawing on my wall as a kid for years. Spatially it feels like one of his least interesting homes, a sequence of long shoebox rooms where you feel the rigid hand of a controlling architect who has exhausted the potentials of his Prairie dogma. “Responsible for popularising the attached garage” should be on its tombstone. Perhaps the unbridled enthusiasm of the tour guide extolling every detail as a work of genius didn’t help ⚰️
The Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, by I.W. Colburn, 1969 – complete with a cubic airlock-style entrance portal entirely encrusted with another astonishing ceramic mural by Ruth Duckworth, ‘Earth, Water, Sky’. It gives the sense of being plunged headlong into the depths of the earth’s crust, an apt arrival for what awaits inside. As the chair of the department wrote to his colleagues: “Mrs Duckworth has spent a great deal of time prowling in our library and looking at rocks, minerals, landscapes, waves and weather, on our behalf.“ 🪨☄️ 🌊🌪️ Thanks again to @matthewlloydr for the tip 👌
A second post of ‘The Reg’ library at the University of Chicago, by Walter Netsch at SOM, 1970, this time of the interiors – thanks to @matthewlloydr for persuading me to go back to see Ruth Duckworth’s astonishing ceramic mural, Clouds Over Lake Michigan, 1976. Final slide is Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy, 1966, outside the library on the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor 💥
“The Reg” - SOM’s chiselled limestone temple of books, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, built in 1970 as a brutalist fortress to house over 4.5 million volumes. Led by Walter Netsch at SOM, it was later expanded with a bulbous glass bubble by Helmut Jahn in 2011 📚
Astonishing visit to the Deer Island wastewater treatment plant, where 380 million gallons of Boston’s sewage is treated each day inside a cluster of 12 gigantic egg-shaped sludge digesters, rising out of by a Pomo brick temple worthy of Mario Botta, complete with its own colosseum of sludge. Huge thanks to @jacek_smolicki for arranging the tour as part of the @walking_festival_of_sound ! 💩🥚✨ @loebfellows
Fun to revisit the Gropius House in Lincoln, MA, with the @loebfellows , built in 1938 with the help of Marcel Breuer, when Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius was chair of @harvardgsd_architecture . I’d forgotten how much he and his wife Ise liked curtains – from fishing net curtains on the landing to rubbery smoky grey curtains to screen the kitchen. And that they were also keen ping-pong players 🏓
Amazing visit to the @indianhillhouse in Groton, MA, designed in 1963 by Maurice K. Smith, a cultish professor at MIT. Part treehouse, part Japanese temple, it is a tour de force of intersecting volumes framed by simple blockwork walls and fir columns and beams that slip and slide past each other, creating a multilevelled landscape of constant views and connections, with endless landings and mezzanines connected by little stairs-cum-shelves and ladders. As Henry Plummer put it, the house contains “innumerable locales, of fragmentary rooms loosely interlocked, of zones both intimate and grand, created for an almost endless array of eyes, and heads and bodies and voices”. Huge thanks to @ggwidmayer for hosting a visit of @loebfellows and to George Claflen for making the connection.
Disney’s Burbank Studios, featuring Michael Graves’ Team Disney building (1990), Venturi Scott Brown’s Frank G. Wells building (1998) and Bob Stern’s Feature Animation building (1994) - thanks to @spectacular.vernacular for the tour! 🐭🏰
‘Dubbed Zhemchug (meaning pearl) after the jewellery shop that occupied the building’s first floor, this bold vertical neighbourhood was the heady 1970s vision of Ofeliia Aidinova, one of the few female architects to rise to prominence in Soviet Uzbekistan,’ writes Oliver Wainwright (@ollywainwright ) in his revisit of Zhemchung in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Zhemchug was designed to be a flagship of municipal social housing in Soviet Tashkent. The courtyards that puncture the tower every three floors imitate the tight‑knit streets of traditional mahalla neighbourhoods. They provide space for the activities of a residential street: a place to dry laundry, grow plants and play – they even include built‑in climbing frames. The tower is crowned with a pool and a sun deck, with concrete parasols that double as the exhausts of ventilation shafts.
Conceived at a time of mass social housing, of which there is now very little remaining in Uzbekistan, this extraordinary vertical pearl holds vital lessons that the new wave of towers would do well to learn from.
Read the full revisit in the Universal housing issue, and at the link in our bio.
📸 1 Olga Alexeyenko (@oalexeyenko_photo ); 3–4, 6 Roberto Conte (@ilcontephotography ); 5 Armin Linke (@arminlinkeofficial )
