Bertrand “Bud” Goldberg was born in Chicago in 1913 and studied architecture at the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that was an influence on Modernist architecture. He returned to Chicago in 1934 and studied at Armour Institute (now known as Illinois Institute of Technology). After working with architect George Fred Keck, Goldberg started his own practice in 1937.

His first projects included pre-fabricated housing and commercial structures, a Clark-Maple gasoline service station in Chicago, and a North Pole Ice Cream store in River Forest. He worked alone until 1950, when he partnered with Leland Atwood in the firm Atwood and Goldberg, which lasted two years. In 1952, he started Bertrand Goldberg Associates.

In 1959, with about ten people working for him, Goldberg was hired by the Building Service Employees International Union (now known as the Service Employees International Union) to develop Marina City, a mixed-use project on the north bank of the Chicago River. That side of the river at that time was socially disconnected from the pedestrian activity of the Loop. Marina City was designed to integrate shopping, entertainment, offices, parking, and residences into one square block. Residents would sail into the marina or drive into the 19-story parking ramp, then walk to their office or take an elevator to their apartments high above the complex.

Goldberg also designed the Astor Tower Hotel in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood as well as a public housing project on Chicago’s south side. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Goldberg was asked to design many mixed-use tower projects throughout the country, but for political or financial reasons most of them were never built.

Goldberg did design hospital projects in Milwaukee, Tacoma, Boston, and Phoenix, in which a central core for shared services branched into subsidiary pods for individual residences. He also designed the large Health Sciences Center in Stony Brook, New York and the Prentice Women’s Pavilion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Bertrand Goldberg Associates expanded to more than 30 people in the early 1960s, 50 employees by the end of the decade, and more than 100 in the 1970s. Their last major work was Wright College, completed in 1992. The firm closed shortly after Goldberg died in 1997.

Goldberg’s work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Institute, and the Paris Art Center. He’s regarded as both a daring artist and a practical engineer. A humanist, despite his early modernist training. And an influence on “futurologists” who extrapolate from existing trends and make sophisticated predictions about the future.

His wife, Nancy, owned a prestigious restaurant in Chicago, Maxim’s de Paris, which she managed from 1963 to 1982. Maxim’s was a replica of a famous Parisian restaurant, Café de Paris, and located in the basement of Astor Tower, a high-rise building designed by Bertrand Goldberg in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. The restaurant is now The Nancy Goldberg International Center, operated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs as a facility for private events.

“Bud,” as his friends called him, had an interest in theater, having studied stage design and lighting at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago at the age of 12. A colleague, Ben Honda, once described Goldberg as “a frustrated actor.”