Helstein Residence, Chicago, Illinois

One of the last single-family houses of Goldberg’s career was his spectacular design for the home of labor leader Ralph Helstein, built in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park. This two-story house evokes the raw structural clarity of Le Corbusier’s 1914 Maison Dom-ino, with four cylindrical concrete columns at the corners of the building, supporting three identical concrete slabs for the floors and roof. The interior reveals a remarkably expansive space and compact, interlocking features, including a dramatic suspended staircase that extends the full height of the building, a large number of custom furniture pieces, and a double-height living room and balcony that evoke the industrial qualities of Charles and Ray Eames’s 1949 house in Los Angeles. In the context of Goldberg’s oeuvre, the Helstein House also serves as an interesting prototype or model for his much larger, similarly expressive Astor Tower, designed from 1958.