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Marina City’s theatrical flourish
Originally designed for live theater, the saddle-shaped theater building was constructed with space frames, arched beams, and sprayed concrete – and covered in lead sheathing which acted as a sound deadening material.
Bertrand Goldberg compared the theater’s design to the physical structure of an arm. “Where the exterior concrete frame of the theatre touches the ground, we have the elbow. At the extreme cantilevered reaching end, we have the hand. And high up, we have the shoulder. The roof is slung by means of catenary [curved] cables between the hand and the shoulder. The seats, the gallery, is supported along the concrete arm itself.”
(Left) Theater building in 2007, occupied by House of Blues Chicago.
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Besides the main entrance on the east side, there was an entrance to the theater building on the west side, near the Dearborn Street bridge. It led to an exhibition space named McFetridge Hall in honor of William McFetridge, whose labor union financed the development of Marina City.
According to Ben Honda, who worked for Goldberg, the Marina City architect was a patron of the arts. He would sometimes fly to New York for an opening night and then fly back to Chicago. Honda believed that Goldberg was hoping the Goodman Theatre, a prominent regional theater company in Chicago, could be lured to the theater building at Marina City. Starting out in 1925 at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Goodman did eventually move in 2000 to an old theater building a few blocks away from Marina City on North Dearborn Street.
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These photographs, taken by Bertrand Goldberg in 1965, show the steel framework being installed on the theater building. In the third image, workers install the lead roofing.
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(Left) Theater building, circa 1967. Photographs by Hedrich Blessing.
(Below left) Main entrance to theater building. A directory printed on the lobby windows left and right of the entrance points to McFetridge Hall, a restaurant, “towers,” parking cashier, and television station WFLD. (Click on image to view larger version.)
(Below right) Closer view of theater building lobby, from northeast corner of building. In lower left frame, an escalator is visible, inside the lobby, that led to the lower level of the commercial platform. The parking cashier station can be seen at right. (Click on image to view larger version.)
Also visible are three paintings by Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), a Hungarian-French artist. According to Goldberg’s son, Geoffrey, the paintings were commissioned by Bertrand Goldberg and, years later, “sold at auction by the Swibel family. Whether they owned them or not.”
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