Biography Overview

Bertrand Goldberg was a creative architect who established a sizable architectural and engineering practice.

Bertrand Goldberg poses with a model of the towers designed for River City towers

Bertrand Goldberg was born in Chicago in 1913. He grew up in Chicago and attended Harvard College in 1930 for two years before studying at the Bauhaus in Germany. While there, he worked briefly in the Berlin office of Mies van der Rohe.

He returned to Chicago in 1933, and worked for the Keck brothers, and in 1937, opened his own office.

During World War II, Goldberg worked for the government designing portable medical labs and gun crates. After the war, he formed a partnership with Leland Atwood, which lasted through the early 1950s, after which he started his own firm of Bertrand Goldberg Associates.

Early in his career Goldberg focused on single family residences and industrial design work into the 1950s. when his design proposals covered a broad spectrum including union halls, art centers, office buildings, and residential developments. In 1957, Goldberg built Drexel Gardens on the south side of Chicago.

In 1959, Goldberg started work on Marina City. This project, a major achievement in his career, was completed in 1967.

Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, the office of Bertrand Goldberg Associates grew significantly – including in-house engineering and computer software development. Design work focused on numerous large scale hospitals and other major institutional projects up until 1992. Parallel work on urban projects was more exploratory and culminated in River City, a successful mixed use development on the Chicago River completed in 1986. The office’s last major built work was Wright College, completed in 1992. Bertrand Goldberg died in 1997.

A young Goldberg in his Chicago office, 1950s.