Well-Stacked Apartments

The tallest apartment houses ever built will start rising this summer in the heart of Chicago's downtown area, north of the Loop. Architect Bertrand Goldberg, 46, a onetime student of Mies van der Rohe. devotes the first 18 floors of his pair of circular towers to a spiral ramp for automobiles, and the top 40 stories to pie-shaped apartments, each with its own balcony. Called Marina City, the project will fill a 3.1-acre plot, now occupied by a railroad siding bordering on the Chicago River hard by the famed Wrigley Building, will include drydock storage space for 700 boats, a theater, a ten-story office building, and a park. Cost: $36 million, to be financed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Building Service Employees' International Union. It was the first time that such a project has been financed by a labor union, but in this case it made sense. "Unless we protect the growth of downtown centers," a union official explained last week, "the safety of our own jobs will be at stake."

Architect Goldberg's most daring stroke was to raise all the 896 projected apartments well above city noise and dust, while providing garage space underneath for each family. His next best stroke: balconies for every apartment, overlooking the daytime and nighttime splendors of Chicago as if from a magic carpet. Rents, surprisingly enough, will start at a modest $115 a month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.