Marina City: The Corncob Towers of Bertrand Goldberg

Why is it significant?

Look up across the river at the twin sixty-story cylindrical towers of Marina City, affectionately dubbed the Corncobs by generations of Chicagoans.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Look up across the river at the twin sixty-story cylindrical towers of Marina City, affectionately dubbed the Corncobs by generations of Chicagoans. Notice the remarkable design: the bottom nineteen floors are open spiral parking ramps where parked cars seem to dangle dramatically over the edge of the abyss, while the upper forty stories blossom into semicircular residential balconies.

Designed by visionary architect Bertrand Goldberg, a student of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Bauhaus, Marina City was completed in nineteen sixty-four as a radical city within a city. At a time when suburban flight was draining American downtowns, Goldberg designed these towers with a bowling alley, ice-skating rink, theater, marina for seven hundred boats, and groceries so residents could live, work, and play twenty-four hours a day without ever leaving the property.

Movie lovers will remember the famous stunt in the nineteen eighty Steve McQueen film The Hunter, where a stunt driver raced a Pontiac off the sixteenth floor of the parking ramp, plunging straight into the Chicago River below!

Continue west along the riverwalk toward the colossal Merchandise Mart.