March 9, 2011 – Officials at The Art Institute of Chicago are busy working on an exhibition that will open in September celebrating the work of Bertrand Goldberg, Marina City’s architect.

Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention will fill three galleries of the Art Institute’s new modern wing, according to Lori Hanna Boyer, Exhibitions and Collections Manager. The exhibit will run September 10, 2011 through January 8, 2012.

According to the Art Institute’s website, the exhibit will feature “over 100 original architectural drawings and models as well as examples of [Goldberg’s] graphic and furniture designs.”

Curator Alison Fisher, who recently lectured on Goldberg’s concrete clover-leafed Prentice Hospital, did not respond to requests for further details.

The institute is the caretaker of the Bertrand Goldberg Archive, a collection of photographs, drawings, correspondence, manuscripts, publications, and audiovisual materials documenting the architect’s career from 1942 to 1997. The archive, including about 30,000 documents, was a gift to the Art Institute from Goldberg’s three children, Lisa, Nan, and Geoffrey.

Goldberg’s work, says the Art Institute’s website, “offers important perspectives on the multidisciplinary practices of today’s architects and designers.”

(Above) This early Marina City design might be included in the exhibit. A request by MCO for a small sample of the exhibit to illustrate this article was referred to the Art Institute’s image licensing department, which sells reproductions of artworks.

On display at the same time will be photographs of homes of some Marina City residents. Photographer Andreas Larsson and architect Iker Gil, who lives at Marina City, have been working on Inside Marina City since 2009.

Websites:

• The Art Institute of Chicago’s Bertrand Goldberg Archive
• Goldberg biography, projects and resources maintained by his son, Geoffrey