Architecture

Against Chicago’s matrix of steel, glass and right angles, Bertrand Goldberg’s twin Marina City blocks – giant, scallop-edged concrete cylinders – are like two fingers held up to the rest of the city. When they were completed in the early 1960s, locals began referring to them as “the corncobs” but there’s far more to the Marina City towers than their shape. Goldberg’s “city within a city” was his solution for affordable urban housing at a time when professionals were moving to the suburbs. The towers start with a helter-skelter of car parks up to floor 19. Floors 21 to 60 are divided into pie-slices of three different variations to create studios and one- or two-bedroom units, each with their own balcony. There’s also a supermarket, launderette, dry cleaner, gym and marina. Marina City offers all the attractions of life in the suburbs for almost 900 apartments in the middle of the city.

Alexander Calder’s dynamic vermilion “Flamingo” sculpture serves as the perfect companion to this muted matt-black complex. Completed in 1974, five years after the architect’s death, the project consists of three buildings – the 42-storey John C Kluczynski Federal Building, the 30-storey Everett M Dirksen US Courthouse and the single-storey pavilion-style Post Office – organised around an open plaza. The whole site, which is aligned on a rigid grid system, is classic Mies: curtain-wall structures conforming to the key characteristics of the International Style, namely large panes of glass, flat roofs, visible steel frames and no applied ornament. In short, a complete rejection of traditional civic buildings fashioned after heavily embellished European architecture.

Oscar Wilde may have dismissed it as “a castellated monstrosity” but the Chicago Water Tower has a solid fan base among Chicagoans. Designed by William W Boyington, the gothic-revival tower is one of the only structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire – it was completed in 1869 just two years before the inferno – and is the second-oldest water tower in the US. Featuring four identical façades crowded with crenellations, lancet windows, turrets and parapets, the building is essentially just a fancy encasement for a large water pump, intended to draw water from Lake Michigan. It hosts a small gallery run by the Chicago Office of Tourism and, if you’re willing to listen to wagging tongues, a fair share of paranormal activity.