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Base Conditions –

Marina City: Re-imagining the Basic Unit of the Metropolis 2014

Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City stands as one of Chicago’s most celebrated icons of mid-century modernism. Completed in 1964, the mixed-use “city within a city” fuses residential, commercial, and recreational programs into a vertical community, anticipating contemporary conversations about density, convenience, and urban life. This renovation reimagines a one-bedroom unit for live/work use while carefully preserving the spirit of Goldberg’s architectural language.

Over the course of a decade of residency, the project evolved through a series of deliberate, incremental adjustments—operations of cutting, filling, and hanging. These interventions strip away conventional domestic markers to create an open, flexible interior that supports both daily life and professional work. Walls and thresholds are minimized, surfaces neutralized, and elements re-scaled to accommodate new modes of inhabitation while remaining visually restrained, so that Goldberg’s concrete frame and the apartment’s signature curvature remain central.

Drawings function as both a design tool and a record of lived experience—mapping how architectural ideas respond to the practical realities of inhabiting a space over time. This iterative process blurs the line between design and life, with the apartment itself functioning as a site of continual experimentation. The project captures the unit’s state after ten years: a space simultaneously minimalist and adaptable, situated within its historical lineage yet responsive to the shifting demands of urban life.

HIGHLIGHTS The Marina City apartment was featured as a filming location in Candyman (2021), directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and produced by Oscar winner Jordan Peele. Released on August 27, 2021, the film marked DaCosta as the first Black female director to debut a movie at No. 1 in the U.S. box office.

Base Conditions was featured in a two-page Wall Street Journal article by Alina Dizik, titled “Chicago’s Marina City Towers Get Cast in the New Candyman,” published on November 5, 2021.