We have been working on Marina City since 1959. In the course of work on Marina City, many of our ideas have developed.
Today, I have decided to present to you both our original ideas as we launched Marina City and our latest ideas as we are swinging into the completion of Marina City.
The first portion of this afternoon’s session are excerpts from a presentation which I gave in 1959 at the Art Institute of Chicago as Marina City was announced and foundations were being started.
The second portion of this afternoon’s talk has come from excerpts of a speech which I gave at a Design Conference on environment at Aspen, Colorado.
I hope that our struggles and thoughts in some way will give you comfort in the coming development at Edmonton in that you are not alone in your doubts, your problems and the solutions which will come to you for them as you undertake this great work.
Marina City 1959 Part I Presented at Seminar on Architectural Aspects of Edmonton Civic Centre Plan Edmonton, Alberta, Canada September 27, 1962
Today I am to talk about our new $36 million living center in the heart of Chicago at the Chicago River and State Street – Marina City. I’m going to tell you about the blood and guts of its design and do a crystal ball on the way men may expect to find cities in the next 40 years of this century.
My Mother-in-law asked me to describe the Central City planning which Marina City envisions. I went through a rather lengthy and philosophical explanation, and she said very simply and brightly, “Oh, that’s what we used to call living above the store.”
Where “living-above-the-store” is still possible, certain critical and difficult problems which are a part of our daily downtown Central City life don’t exist.
There is no commuting problem, except to get downstairs to work.
There is no service problem. The high population density makes all services available, cheaply and quickly.
There is no “cultural” problem. The community is its own culture: the museum or the concert is the “guy next door” – and not the trip which must be deliberately undertaken to absorb a higher experience. There is more leisure and more ways to use it for the man who “lives above the store.”
There is another interesting by-product in taxes and all other kinds of building expense. It costs less to live above the store than it does to live away from work.
Finally, men-most men- like the action that comes from living together. We like the market place, we like the forum. We like the social and mental heat that we generate when we rub against each other. We like cities.
In today’s program, I am first going to describe city planning-how it got way out in orbit as science in the 19th Century, how it is coming back to use in the 20th in the warmth of humanism, and under the guidance of our tax needs.
Finally, I am going to look ahead into the plans for our future cities:
What is a City?
Do men make them; or are they in the blood as a way or life?
What are the rules of planning for a city today?
Lewis Mumford, who has spent most of his life as a critic of cities, believes that the ability of the City to attract non-residents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus, no less than trade, remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its inherent dynamism–as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.
The city is that meeting place where men come and go, generating by their movements the material growth and human experience which are the life-stuff of the city. This sense of movement is inherent in the city and is its contrast to the settlement to the village. The movement of the city is both spiritual and material and the city becomes the symbol of the possible.
Are cities in our blood?
Are cities the natural forms of shelter which men build for themselves? Like the spider his web, or the oyster his shell? The answer to this is uncertain, but I believe it to be – yea. Men have in every known culture built some kind of city, some center of human movement. Priest cities, trade cities, king cities, culture cities, work cities – these have existed in cultures-Mesopotamian and Mexican alike. Men, whether in outer space or Alberta, will make a city.
Aristotle said, “Men come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the good life.”
The city is that meeting place needed by men where they must freely come and go.
Now, the rules for planning the meeting place.
The varied opinions on cities in the 19th Century produced what we call the science of city planning. The same kind of thinking of the 19th Century, which induced Darwin to take the history of man from the Bible and into the field of science, also led City Planning from the field of art into the field of statistics, economics under the major heading of Science. It is a long way from the warm, spontaneous planning of Piazza San Marco in Venice to the rigidity of Ludwig Hilbersheimer.
The 19th Century promised us all kinds of scientific solutions. The economic millennium was just around the corner. The basic solution to the physical world was imminent. The 19th Century assured us that, “If you can only reduce human problems to statistics, these problems can be solved on an unemotional, scientific level.”
If men can be split into the problems of production and problems of the body, we can establish the science of City Planning.
We needed 19th Century Marxism before Frank Lloyd Wright could give us Broad-Acre City. We needed the Marxist concept called “production” that was separate from the thing called “people.”
The 19th Century scientific approach also gave us Freud, and the Science of Psychoanalysis. Human problems were determined in childhood and the importance of the later environment was minimized. When environment disappeared as a determinant of behavior, the scientists of city planners could regulate men and human life as they have tried to regulate production, traffic and other materialistic problems.
One of the intellectual heirs to the Science of Planning was Corbusier.
Corbusier said, in about 1925, that the right angle is the essential and sufficient implement of action, because it enables us to determine space of absolute exactness.
He says that the main thesis of his city planning is that such a vast and complicated machine is the modern great city-that it can only be made adequately to function on a basis of strict functional order.
Mies van der Rohe in his introduction to Hilbersheimer’s book says, “Reason is the first principle of all human work.” Mies says that city planning is in essence of a work of order.
Hilbersheimer, himself a famous planner, has stated the problem in this fashion, “The solutions we seek for our cities must be based upon economic realities.”
This 19th Century trend of transforming human components to their scientific symbols continues with men like Corbusier, van der Rohe and Hilbersheimer to dominate the Science of City Planning.
But there has also grown up what I call the Anti-Science of City Planning. This new Scientific Anti-Science is a mark of health – a mark of resolution that cities are planned for men and non one really has successfully designed a standard package for the standard man.
For example, we have always planned our cities for families with children, but no one has troubled to determine what is a child. As we live longer, as we become healthier, we wish to prolong our youth, we wish our children to remain children for a longer period of time, and as a consequence, the family unit remains as such for a longer period of time. Our children still in college when they are beyond the legal age limit are still called “children.”
This family unit with the adult child is not the same type of family unit for which one plans suburban sandboxes. Here we see the first inroads of the science of planning for families with children. We no longer know what they are.
There is another inroad that has been make by our Anti-Scientific group on definitions of health. Health may be freedom from care as readily as it may be freedom from city smoke. Health may be freedom from the heart attacks that are produced by lawnmowers and health may be the result of reasonably controlled temperature summer and winter, reasonably controlled sanitation and reasonably controlled physical amenities, such as hot water. It is not always necessary to think of health as that condition of mankind which proceeds from the barbecue on the suburban lawn.
The Anti-Scientists have also established beyond question the need for mental stimulation in a man’s environment. There has come a creeping doubt in the minds of planners as to whether all men are happy in the rigid level contours of suburban environment.
The kinetics of urban environment are intriguing. We do not yet know whether the sense of movement is necessary to all men. Certainly all men love to live at least a portion of their lives with and amidst the movement of ideas, amidst a movement of cultural experience and amidst something so simple as the movement of lights which occur during the 24-hour day in the city.
The Anti-Scientists in City Planning have not yet used such words as the “mystique” of the city, but there is a magic to the city which has not been accounted for by any planner. It accounts for the fact that 50% of urban growth is comprised of influx of country boys.
There is a new return of the ex-urbanite, which is still unmeasured, but which we know to be substantial.
Neither of these groups knows any better. Neither of these groups knows that for almost a century now life in the country, life in the suburbs was supposed to be far superior to Central City, and yet the movement toward the Center continues.
There is an apparent need for men to become a part of their productive environment.
We are beginning to realize that men cannot become disconnected from their environment. We are beginning to realize that the separation of man into a production machine and into a well-analyzed group of conditioned reflexes cannot produce a city plan. Correspondingly, we recognize that a city plan that does not take into consideration the total man and his total environment will produce an unnatural city.
There is an economic problem in planning that we will discuss before we look at the city of the future.
Several weeks ago, I had the experience of walking down Park Avenue near Grand Central Station. I was overwhelmed by the blind “Curtainwalledness” of the entire area and amazed at the reshaping of Park Avenue.
Apartment buildings are being town down and replaced by offices. Briefly, this is the real estate man’s answer to need for additional income. Space, which as apartments is returning $3 a square foot, is being replaced by space, which as offices, is returning $8 a square foot – very simple mathematics.
In addition to the rebuilding of Park Avenue as an office area, Grand Central Station is being rebuilt with a new population of 25,000 office workers.
There is obviously enough money in New York to provide the additional subway facilities, the additional utilities, the streets, the sewer, the water supply for this new and highly concentrated daytime population.
But there is another factor which will have to enter this planning. A 24-hour day population is being replaced by a 7-hour per day population for a period of only a 5-day week.
Our growth of leisure time results in two by-products: One, we are most familiar with: More time to devote to leisure activities; the second by-product is the idle standby time of our specialized areas of offices, factories, and urban services, public transportation, streets, sewers, water supply lines, generating facilities, gas lines, a police force, a fire department.
We are replacing in New York the historical natural-city growth plan, the “unplanned plan” if you wish, with a specialized plan. We are saying that the Victorian hangover of our 19th Century scientific solutions causes us to put offices here, people there, factories there without relationship to the length of time we can use our capital investment in those facilities.
There is no type of specialized working unit which by itself can support the high cost of Center City, and there is no housing unit which by itself can support these costs on a part-time basis.
There is an imperative to our future planning which we have caused by our taxes and our investments. It will be necessary to have combined activities of housing, of recreation, and of work to carry this tax load and the investment in our urban services if our center cities are to survive.
The tax imperative states that we must restore our use of urban environment to the 24-hour day, 7-days per week-both summer and winter.
This is what William L. McFetridge was thinking in Chicago when he said: “Let’s build a city within a city where most of our members hold their jobs. Let us bring people back to live in the Center Cities of America. But let us provide for them as a way of living, a complete life.”
What I have been describing so far has been the introspection which came about when you asked me to tell the story of what we were designing at Marina City. This is the story of the boy with his hand in the cookie jar-with his mouth full, who was trying to explain how he got there. All of this thinking, all of these thought processes, all of this philosophy has somehow dribbled into the consciousness of the architect. Marina City was not designed with these paragraphs before me.
Marina City was already designed – I was asked to explain it, and in order to explain it, it seems to me that I have had to explain much of the present thinking which I hope certainly has become a part of not only my own subconscious, but of every productive person in the fields which touch our economic planning.
So now, let us examine the design of Marina City, and let us see if the design of Marina City belongs to the environment of today’s thinking.
The space in which Marina City is located, as you can see from the slide, is in a forest of high buildings. Marina City, itself, will occupy almost a square block between State Street and Dearborn Street on the north bank of the river.
This is Marina City. Here in Marina City, we have completely eliminated the concept of the street. We have created a plaza in the best European classical sense of the city square, and on the plaza we have erected five interrelated buildings.
The plaza in itself marks the disappearance of the corridor street. The plaza becomes the open platform on which automobiles and people, alternately passengers and pedestrians can wander as they choose. Also, in terms of space here in Marina City, we have done what few cathedrals in Europe are able to do. We have reached out for a piece of vertical space, which is so thrilling to men everywhere.
I mention five buildings contained within this indefinable space. The buildings consist of a commercial platform constructed of concrete post and beam system which covers the entire three acres of property. This lower building contains of the going and the coming – the commerce, the health club, the package room, the lobby, the restaurant, the marina for the storage of 700 boats, and indeed the boat slips themselves with the water penetrating 75 feet into the interior of the building. The second and third buildings are the residential towers built of concrete around cores 35′ diameter and 600′ high surmounting the garage by 20 stories. The fourth building is the theatre building with a catenary roof stretched on a concrete frame. This is the Marina City Center – the building which will attract the immediate attention of the pedestrian. And, finally, the fifth building is the office block constructed on bearing concrete mullions which form a background and a fence to mark off the end of Marina City and protect Marina City from the inroads of the yet undeveloped areas to the north.
Marina City at night is a lighted city. The question of the difference of appearance between daytime and nighttime is an important design factor for urban centers-not so much for the suburbs, not so much for the countryside. But in town where people will live with a structure 24 hours a day, the difference in appearance between the structure summer and winter and day and night becomes a thing of tremendous importance.
Architects are always discussing “scale” – the relationship between the human and the building which surrounds him.
Marina City has been carefully conceived in terms of scale. We first decided that Marina City would be seen from the opposite south bank of the river, then, by people approaching on both the State Street and Dearborn Street bridges. Also, there was an excellent long shot from Michigan Avenue. It was of first importance to consider the appearance of the distant view. This is a view which has no scale except as compared with other buildings in the vicinity. With this view in mind, Marina City will stand out as an intriguing geometric texture of concrete twin towers against a carefully controlled quiet composition of the background commercial building. The theatre building will not be visible to any large extent.
However, upon approach to Marina City, the scale changes tremendously. The towers disappear up above and the pedestrian or the automobile passenger is concerned only with the immediacy of the view.
Here is it necessary to think of the relationship to human size. For this relationship, we have used the Marina City theatre. The central form of the theatre and the sculptural concrete of the theatre has a degree of intimacy which none of the other structures at Marina City has. The theatre, itself, we call the Marina City Center, because it is at this point that people will disembark, and it is from this point that people may reach any other portion of the Marina City under cover with automatic forms of transportation – the escalator, and the elevator.
At an early time of our design, we felt that Marina City required a sizable area for a garden. Later, as we worked through our design, we realized that the size of the garden was not so important as the ability to relate the garden to human scale. In this fashion, we conceived of a design for a sculpture garden, which would surround the sunken skating rink, located near the river front of Marina City. Here it is that people may gather in small groups, talk, sit, contemplate the river, the boats, or the kinetics of the changing lights of the city before them.
We have interesting plans for an annual outdoor sculpture competition for the sculpture garden, but we do not intend to display this in the sense of museum sculpture: rather to let people live among the art work, which is the product of their time.
Marina City has achieved the 24-hour balance of urban activities.
We have housing – 900 units – in the two towers.
We have commercial offices – 180,000 square feet.
We have amusement and recreation centers – theatre, bowling, swimming, skating.
We have health centers – a health club, a gymnasium.
We have the marina.
We have 1200 seat auditorium for political meetings, meetings for discussion, or commercial meetings having to do with presentation of products.
This rubbing together of people through a 24-hour period generates a heat both psychological and economic. As regards the economic heat, the facilities which are contained within the Marina City balance of activities could not possible be supported by single occupancy – either housing or commercial.
And I firmly believe that the concept of total environment creates a pleasurable experience for the occupants. St. Augustin said that beauty is that which gives pleasure. I do not know if that which gives pleasure is also beauty. But we are closer to our objective by creating the pleasurable total life – both physical and spiritual.
This next slide is a close-up of the towers…
The towers have been designed as a central core which contains the elevator shafts, the stairways, all of the utilities, and out from which radiate all of the apartments. The central core is 35′ in diameter. The overall is approximately 105′ in diameter.
The central core is a structural concrete cylinder. It resists the wind and it helps support the building. The shape of the core means that the buildings have only 30% of the wind resistance that they would otherwise have with the same dimension, but in a rectilinear form.
I strongly feel that the shape of these buildings have a relationship of a tree to its branches, as compared with other types of cellular design, which apartment buildings have taken, where each apartment has the relationship of beehive and the cell.
The next slide shows the plan of the building: The central core containing all of the facilities and three typical apartments.
Actually, while these apartments are shown as occurring on a single floor, the plan of the building is somewhat different. There will be 32 floors of efficiency apartments and one-bedroom apartments. There will be eight floors of one-bedroom apartments and two-bedroom apartments.
The buildings will contain 60% one-bedroom apartments, 30% efficiency apartments and 10% two-bedroom apartments.
No apartment door faces into any other apartment door, but rather each apartment door is connected to its trunk – to the core of the building. We feel on a subjective level that this produces a feeling of immediacy and a feeling of the individual house which is not experienced in the beehive type of planning.
These buildings have been described as cylindrical. This is not true. The organization of the building is rather the organization of a tremendous sunflower – where the core is the center of the flower and each of the bays emanating from the core are very much – both in shape and in organization – like the petal of a flower.
The efficiency apartments occupy one of these petals. The one-bedroom apartments occupy a petal and a half; and the two-bedroom apartments occupy two and a half petals.
The efficiency apartment emanates from the core placing the dressing room and bathroom closet to the core where the restricted space in the development of shape makes this most feasible. The kitchen comes next and finally, at the outside of the building, where the function of the building requires the greatest amount of view and light and sensation of openness we have our living-room, dining room, sleeping room combination. Beyond this the balcony which is 10′ by 20′ wide in approximate dimensions with a sensation of continuing expansion of space. When we step out on the balcony, we are at the extreme outside of the petal of the flower.
I am going to show you a view of the interior taken from full-size models, which we have built of these apartments at 316 W. Randolph Street here in Chicago. You may see that there is a feeling of constant expansion – a constant space beyond in that space in which you are presently standing. This is dynamic space in contrast to static space.
The next slide will show the one-bedroom apartment. Here again you may see the way in which we constrict the functional aspects of the apartment to the narrow dimension of the flower petal and expand the apartment continuously from the center on toward the outside. Yet, with all of this expanding space, we have a lower ratio of glass area to square footage of living space than more apartment buildings. This produces an efficiency for electric heating and air conditioning. All apartments, incidentally, will be air-conditioned.
This next slide is a view of the bedroom balcony taken at our model apartment built in Chicago. As you can see, the camera man is suspended well over space.
The next slide shows the interior of the one-bedroom living room. This is actually a combination living room and dining room, and you again can see the unfolding of the balcony beyond the enclosed living space. Still beyond the balcony lies the city. In this instance, the photograph of the city was taken from a helicopter exactly located on the building site at the 40th floor of the Marina City towers. There will be 20 floors above this and of course, 40 floors below.
The next slide is that of the two-bedroom apartment, which contains two and a half petals of our flower. The living room is in the central petal. The dining room shares to some extent the petal adjacent to it with a master bedroom where they both use the same balcony.
On the opposite side of the living room is an additional master bedroom with its balcony.
The balconies serve a double function. In the first instance, they permit the expansion of living space, but in the second instance, they permit easy maintenance of the windows with washing, painting and tuckpointing, and of the heat pumps which both heat and cool the apartments. These are located outside over the balcony doors, and you have seen them in the previous photographs.
The air in the halls or central core will be conditioned by a central plant electric heat pump system and maintained under a positive pressure, so that air leakage will be into, and not out of the apartments.
I would like to discuss for a moment the automobile storage space. We have used our automobile garage building budget to elevate the apartments above the noise and dirt of the streets. Then by the careful planning of the commercial areas – swimming pool and service areas below the plaza – we have managed to create a feeling of openness and expansiveness at the pedestrian plaza level.
The commercial building has been designed as a backstop to our residential towers. Here again, we have continued our use of concrete as a materiel relating the office building to the residential towers through the use of a single material. We have designed our office building wall as a texture, rather than as a revelation of the special structural system. The office building as you remember shelters the project from the undeveloped area lying to the north.
The theatre building is the building which will be seen in terms of greatest intimacy by the approaching pedestrian or passenger. This is a building which in its scale of forms we have retained personal intimacy and suggestion of masculinity. We hope that there is a physical quality to the design of the theatre, which will relate the onlooker to the composition as a whole.
The next slide shows the curious relationship of the structure of the theatre tot he physical structure of an arm. Where the exterior concrete frame of the theatre touches the ground, we have the elbow. At the extreme cantilevered reaching end, we have the hand. And high up, we have the shoulder. The roof is slung by means of catenary cables between the hand and the shoulder. The seats, the gallery, is supported along the concrete arm itself.
We have used many devices to relate the theatre form to the pedestrian. We have mentioned the masculinity of the form, we have mentioned the physical quality of the form. A third relationship is in the slope of the theatre overhang. This is identical to the slope of the automobile ramp, and will relate these complex buildings one to the other.
The next slide shows the rear of the theatre which will be the Dearborn Street frontage. Here you may see the shoulder muscles which are holding the shoulder down to the ground and which keep the structure from tipping over around its elbow.
Marina City is the microcosm of the city. It is a total urban center. A total environment. It is a way for people – some people – to live and a necessity certainly if Center City is to survive.
Marina City has been called revolutionary, but I do not believe along with Corbusier that things are revolutionized by making revolutions. The revolution lies in the solution of existing problems.
The Central City Plan
City Planners are usually the last people to arrive at the ideas of their time. After the idea has jelled, after the demand for a living pattern has been clearly expressed by the “consumer market,” the planner uses the idea. And this goes for the banker who finances the plan.
This procedure of the planner bringing up the rear with the help of the banker is in the great scheme of things, proper. The states are too great, both in terms of human life and money to allow the planner more than the role of showing the public the ideas which it has already accepted.
The England of the early 19th Century had already enthusiastically undertaken the idea of industrialization when the planners first began to place the houses around the factory. Later in the Century, the ideas of Ruskin and Morris had already been put on wallpaper when the planners used these same ideas for the “garden city.”
Our plans for the ideal residential community, the suburban community, separating the city from the country, have their roots in the scientific planning of more than 80 years ago. And the plan for the high-rise city apartment surrounded by an expanse of unusable, unwalkable, green grass belongs to the concepts of organized urban society dating back 40 years.
We acknowledge that we follow “precedent” as planners – but for bankers who expect the economic life of a project to extend through the next two generations, it is important to know we are following this year’s “precedent,” and not the one which is already downgrading last year’s projects.
There is a new “precedent” in this year’s planning: in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston; in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit; in Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans; in Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco – there is a new plan. The new plan is to make the Central City habitable.
The new plan has economic roots. We wish to save our investments. But the new plan has human roots. People like to live closely and enjoy the work and the play which is the byproduct of high density living.
If you could take a giant cookie cutter and take out a section of Chicago’s Loop, take all the human activities whereby people express themselves throughout a 24-hour day, and reshape this cookie into a vertical pattern to occupy a square block – if you could do this, you would have the Marina City plans.
Marina City is a mirror of the city:
High density living (300 families per acre)
Working space (180,00 square feet of office
Recreation (boating, swimming, skating, gymnasium, bowling, walking, parks, movies, meeting hall)
Service (restaurant, shops, automobile parking, transportation)
Marina City is a plan for a 24-hour living, which no tenant could afford on less than a 24-hour basis. This means that the facilities for living pleasure offered by Marina City cannot be supported by a commuting population, or a weekend population. And if housing is something more than just shelter and running water, the new housing must provide the background for the leisure time which our work patterns are giving us.
“Urban Renewal” plans have already established a concept of rebuilding an entire cross section of our urban life. We rebuild houses, shops and work space.
But beyond “Urban Renewal,” there is an established market, a voiced demand and a public consciousness to provide for people once again, the balanced life of a Center City. More than 3500 applications for Marina City living already received testify that people want to live together with their work and want the recreation and the moderate rents which can be offered in high tax, high cost areas, only by tapping a 24-hour source of income.
Marina City income is divided about 1/3 to upkeep costs and 2/3 to debt service, but neither of these costs could be supported by residential income alone. Over 39,000 families have indicated a desire to live in the Central city area by survey made in April, 1959. Few of these families could afford the Marina City tax rate which would be close to $400 per year per apartment. Few of these families could afford the cost of amortizing recreational facilities provided in Marina City. And without a balanced daytime and nighttime population, the cost of operating either garage or swimming pool would rise beyond the ability of the Marina City tenant to pay for these facilities.
Marina City, therefore, is the new plan for the balanced living which Central City must provide. As the farmer has understood that his house means house and barn; as the suburbanite has understand that his house means house and garage; so does the Urbanite understand that this house means House and Work and Recreation. This is Central City housing.