Cinestage Theater

This theater design was a remodeling project, combining the Harris and Selwyn Theaters on State Street in downtown Chicago. The main hall featured the emerging new technology of Cinestage, an interest shared with Michael Todd at the time. Goldberg worked to incorporate the new aspects of wide-screen projection with a revised seating arrangement, more spatially engaging and dramatic.

For the entry and lobby, Goldberg reached out to Josef Albers, his teacher from the Bauhaus, for design concepts. Albers prepared a model composition for the entry, which Goldberg completed. The design featured glass entry doors for the theater with etched circles in a geometric pattern, internally lit with neon tubes in the door frames. The lobby featured dramatic photo collages amid striped marble, with an unusual star-like ceiling with small plexiglas rods, backlit with neon, and finished in gold (Dutch) leaf.

Most all was lost in later years; however Tim Samuelson and Frank Kruesi recovered some ceiling panels, which were restored for the 2011 Arts Club show and are now on display at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Preliminary studies were done for another Cinestage in Brussels (1957) but all work stopped when Todd was tragically killed in a plane crash the following year. Goldberg’s interest in theater design continued at Marina City and in the later San Diego theater proposal.