Recently, I spent an afternoon at the Art Institute here in Chicago. Given a long line at the old entrance, on Michigan Avenue, we went around the corner to the modern wing, designed by Renzo Piano. After checking out some modern art, contemporary photography experiments, and a handful of the classics, we found our way to an exhibit on the designer of the Marina Towers, Bertrand Goldberg.
He started studying architecture at Harvard, spent some time at the Bauhaus Dessau in the thirties, and ended up briefly working for Mies Van Der Rohe in Chicago. He came into contact with a laundry list of mid-century masters, from Josef Albers to Frank Lloyd Wright. He opened his own practice in 1937, but was interrupted by World War II in 1941. One of his projects from that era, the Clark-Maple service station, was an amazing pre-fabricated, mast-suspended, curtain-wall structure.
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| The Clark Maple Service Station, elevation. Courtesy, as are all these images (unless otherwise noted), of the amazing online archives of the Art Institute. |
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| Photo of the finished gas station. |
