architecture

I don’t know the reason for it, but that geodesic thing never flew. Maybe it was too hard too build, maybe it just wasn’t all that fired up great like it was made out to be. But at one time he was seen as a visionary, but later he was seen as a kind of a crackpot. Well not a crackpot really, just kind of an impractical guy, and he hung around Southern Illinois University for awhile as their resident genius, and then he died and was forgotten.

Well not entirely. His name lives on in bucky balls, which are are a spherical form of carbon atoms that once were thought to have amazing properties, and maybe they do, but so far they haven’t found something useful they could do for humanity.

Bertrand Goldberg, who designed Marina City, designed several other circular buildings. There was one at Northwestern Hospital that they just tore down, and a retirement village maybe three miles south of me, and another along the south branch of the river called River City. That last one is pretty cool, though the tall towers that Bertrand wanted to add to it never got built, and it doesn’t get much ink because it is too far from downtown.

I think he was a star with Marina City, and then maybe overreached with River City, and then when he built the retirement village you can see where he kind of toned down his work to make it look a little like everything else, and that Northwestern building was kind of an itty bitty thing, maybe they just wanted to get his name for prestige.

Same thing happened to my hero Louis Sullivan when he fell into disfavor and started doing those banks all through the midwest. The first one, in Owatonna, is the most spectacular, but after that the bankers got cheaper and the banks became a little smaller, a little plainer.

Well it must be hell to be an architect, if you want to be a big star architect. You or me, we can just pick up our keyboards or our brushes and write a song or paint a picture, but an architect, you have to talk these boring banker types, who just want a big box to make their money, to shell out for all the terra cotta and the stained glass that will fulfill your vision.

There have been condo towers going up all around me ever since I moved here, and they all look pretty much the same, even Daley II who was no architectural maven complained. Well there is that other problem with doing something visionary and new, a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright houses have leaky roofs.

Marina City had problems early on. The apartments are not actually pie shaped, they are trapezoidal with the smallest side at the doorway. This means no right angles, and people were all like where am I going to put Grandma’s heirloom bureau drawer? When the building was first built it was all apartments and the realtors had these model apartments set up with furniture that fit them, and I guess that eased the worries of the renters, and everything worked out okay.