Chicago has many iconic buildings, but perhaps none as instantly recognizable as Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City. Occupying an entire city block--number 1 of the original town of Chicago--the mixed-use riverside complex consists of two cylindrical sixty-five-story residential towers, a saddle-shaped auditorium, a midrise office building, and a rectangular podium comprising an open plaza with a variety of services. Each tower contains more than four hundred apartments and a continuous, upward-spiraling ramp of parking spaces. Built between 1960 and 1967 at a time when Chicagoans were fleeing to the suburbs, the hugely ambitious project was architect Goldberg's collaborative attempt at urban revitalization---as he called it, "a city within a city."
