Look up at the twin towers Chicagoans simply call the corncobs. Designed by Bertrand Goldberg and completed in 1964, Marina City was a radical idea: a city within a city, where people could live, park, shop, bowl, and dock a boat without ever leaving the block. The lower nineteen floors of each round tower are an open spiral parking ramp; above them, pie-slice apartments fan out to scalloped balconies with no straight walls inside.
It was built partly to lure middle-class residents back downtown as they fled to the suburbs. The marina at water level gives the complex its name, with slips opening right onto the Chicago River. The petal-edged balconies stack skyward above the marina slips, and your gaze rests on one of the first true mixed-use residential high-rises in America.