Bruce Alonzo Goff is one of the great architects of the twentieth century. Acclaim for his work came early and often. He was championed by his architectural brethren, among them Frank Lloyd Wright. His stunningly original designs earned multi-page spreads in the popular media of his day, such as Life magazine and Architectural Forum. His career, spanning six decades, has been the subject of laudatory books, exhibitions and films.
And yet. Goff still is not as well-known as he should be, is not immediately recognized outside of architectural or design circles, nor is he easily fixed within the pantheon of American architects, including Wright, Louis Sullivan and Frank Gehry. This, despite, as Goff told one interviewer, “There’s never been a time when my work was not published some way without my effort to do it. Never once.”
The exhibition “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” at the Art Institute of Chicago through the end of March, is an invitation to get to know Goff. It arrives three decades after a 1995 exhibition at the Art Institute, one that focused on Goff’s architectural work and its influences. This latest effort, curated by Alison Fisher and Craig Lee, curator and assistant curator in AIC’s Department of Architecture and Design, goes further into an expansive survey of his creativity.
Drawing from the museum’s archive of Goff-related materials, including his architectural renderings, models and project files, as well as his paintings, music, correspondence and personal objects, “Material Worlds” traces the evolution of Goff as not just an architect but as an artist, a creative both deeply rooted in but also far ahead of his time.
Across eleven galleries that intersect and curve around one another, the show provides a retrospective overview of the range of Goff’s creative expression and experimentation. In addition to drawings for his spectacular architectural projects, some realized, many not, the exhibition includes childhood sketches and works from his teen years, his musical compositions, including those using the technology of the player piano, salvaged elements of his architectural projects that were lost to fire and other misfortunes, his furniture creations and his dazzling and marvelously intricate paintings.
These materials are displayed alongside a selection of personal objects, touchstones in the swirl of cultural currents that animated Goff, including the magazines he read, the clothes he wore, the works of art, ephemera and toys he collected. Fisher says the arrangement of Goff’s “realia” that inaugurate and punctuate the galleries offer “miniature guideposts to his person and his priorities. Each object is meant to be a microcosm for his way of being in the world.”
Goff’s world feels of a piece with ours and also far removed. Born in Alton, Kansas in 1904, he grew up in pre-statehood Oklahoma, when it was still called Indian Territory, land where the U.S. government had forcibly relocated Native Americans.
He began drawing and painting at an early age, nestled among family and community members who modeled and nurtured such talents. His grandmother Lille Furbeck and great-grandmother Harriet Zelida York Messick were both self-taught painters. Messick especially encouraged Goff’s artistry and interest in nature. One of her delicate watercolors, depicting a hummingbird hovering amidst blossoms, is included in the exhibition.
At Central High School, Goff joined the school’s art club, Chiaroscuro (a name he later gave his cat) and, as Lee notes in his deep study of Goff’s abstract paintings in the publication that accompanies the exhibition, was named by his classmates a “futuristic artist” in their senior yearbook. Lee persuasively makes the case for Goff’s painting as an equally prolific and experimental lifelong “parallel practice” to his architectural work.
His art teacher, the artist Adah Robinson, not only furthered his artistic practice and studies, she commissioned him, along with another former student, to build her a house. (Restored starting in 2022 as the “Oath Studio,” the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture claims it is home to the “first known sunken conversation pit.”) Robinson became Goff’s collaborator on an early and major architectural project, Tulsa’s art deco masterpiece Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church South, completed in 1929 and now a National Historic Landmark. Goff began this project when he was only twenty-two.
Goff undertook the Boston Avenue project while at another of his creative havens, the Tulsa-based architects Rush, Endacott and Rush. Goff first landed there at the age of twelve, when his father asked the firm to take his son on as an apprentice. It was here, under the tutelage of people like the firm’s head draftsman, that Goff launched his career as architect and began his long correspondence and friendship with architectural luminaries like Wright and Sullivan.
Wright replied to the still teenage Goff’s first letter to him with an amazing gift, an original edition of his Wasmuth Portfolio, which contains one-hundred lithographs of his work, writing that he was “happy to know I have a friend in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” He and Sullivan both encouraged Goff to stay with the firm rather than go to architecture school, Wright suggesting formal training might only lead him to “lose Bruce Goff.”
Goff stayed on and at age twenty-five became a partner at the reconstituted Rush, Endacott and Goff, a decision many credit with allowing his individualistic and original style to flourish. He remained until the vicissitudes of the Great Depression eroded the business. With encouragement from the sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who collaborated with many architects including Wright, in 1934 Goff moved to Chicago, where he would live and work for almost a decade.
An important element of “Material Worlds” is the way it situates Goff within the communities he either became part of or helped form throughout his life. These relationships are important to the “embodied life story” Fisher and Lee hope to convey in their exhibition, as critical sites for Goff’s own creative development that also work against received ideas about the “isolated genius” that permeate descriptions of his life.
A warm, soft-spoken and gentle giant (Goff was six-foot-four), the architect had a knack for creating community wherever he went and with whomever he met—students, clients and fellow artists. In Tulsa, Goff and his then-wife, the dancer Evelyn Hall, hosted a salon in their home, one that the curators argue “rivaled the avant-garde spaces one usually associates with Paris or New York in the 1920s,” a gathering place for poets, musicians and other painters to host events and create new work, including the magazine Tulsart.
Chicago brought Goff out of Oklahoma for the first time, opening up his world. He not only cultivated new creative allies, including Iannelli, he found the space to flourish professionally, as an independent architect. In “Goff on Goff: Conversations and Lectures,” a collection edited by Philip B. Welch, Goff says he came of age architecturally in Chicago and points to his 1940 Helen Unseth House in Park Ridge as “one of the freshest statements that I was able to make in the early days.”
Goff would go on to build other houses in the city and beyond, including his famed 1950 Ruth and Sam Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, the plans for which are part of the exhibition’s “Chicago Blues” section. That opportunity emerged through his time teaching architecture and design at the now-defunct Chicago Academy of Fine Art, which Ruth Ford, a painter, headed. In the late 1940s, after Goff’s wartime service, she brought him back to build a house and studio for her that would be both an architectural and artistic marvel.
At the Chicago Academy of Fine Art Goff also advanced his artistic practice. Lee describes how Goff integrated his own abstract compositions into curriculum, bringing students to his exhibitions and forming a club where they could undertake their own experiments with the medium.
While developing his professional and artistic life in Chicago, Goff thrived personally, as a queer man in a modern metropolis, home to an established gay subculture. With his marriage to Hall ending in 1932, Goff moved to the city with one of their Tulsa circle, the poet Richard San Jule. They eventually set up a combined office and home on bustling Howard Street in Rogers Park and embarked on a rich romantic and creative alliance.
In his essay for the exhibition publication, Scott Herring focuses on “returning queerness to Goff’s lengthy career,” especially by examining his time in Chicago with San Jule, building on the work of previous scholars such as Carol Mason and David G. De Long, who gave Goff’s sexuality more than the fleeting nod that other critics deemed sufficient. His attentive reading of Goff and San Jule’s love letters in the Art Institute archive brings to life the particulars of their life together and makes the claim that their liaison and collaborations, from creating their “hyper-stylized” shared home to crafting new work, “paved the way for Goff’s contemporary gay aesthetic.”
Bringing together passages from San Jule’s correspondence with sections of Goff’s writings, including his 1930 treatise “A Declaration of Independence” in which he called for architecture to embrace the expressiveness of the contemporary arts, Herring makes the case that this new “Moderne Movement” of thought and feeling Goff advocated was imbued with the queer sensibility he and San Jule were cultivating, through their poetry and art, their study of queer cultural figures such as Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten and the “intimate language” they shared, all of it, in Goff’s words, meant to “beautify this existence.”
What does a small disco ball, one you could find in the aisles of a dollar store, demonstrate about an individual’s artistic practice? “Material Worlds” opens with this object, one piece of Goff’s extensive accumulation of ephemera, suspended in its very own case, part of what Fisher and Lee call the exhibition’s “Object Atlas,” offering a clue to the way life and art interacted for Goff.
Further along the first corridor-like gallery is a well-used plastic T-square, a core architectural tool Goff embellished with colored and mirrored triangles, a frequent, almost obsessively recurring shape across his architecture and art. Then comes a footed ceramic bowl attributed to the early twentieth-century Vienna Workshop. Nearby, a large orange Japanese temari ball hangs overhead, its geometric pattern strikingly similar to the symbol for atomic energy.
This commingling of low and high bits of culture, commercial and artisanal works, old and new technologies, underscored by the dashes of bright orange pink that recur throughout the exhibition space, present Goff as an approachable cultural omnivore, one that thrift-store scavengers or craft-store frequenters would find familiar, an appealing figure for our own bedazzle-happy, mod podge-mad moment.
“He called his collections his ‘aware house,’ something that just attuned him to being open to creative experience and looking carefully at the world,” says Fisher. “So we kind of feel like the mix of materials is very key to how Goff liked to make his spaces and the ways that he felt inspired.”
The use of unconventional materials is a hallmark of Goff’s architectural practice. Take, for example, the list under “found or repurposed materials” in the index of the exhibition publication: “Cake pans, aluminum, calendar art, glass ashtrays, glass cullet… goose feathers, grain bins and silos, military surplus materials, oil field materials, piano rolls, rope.” All of these—and so many more, from yards of shag carpet and the ribs of a Quonset hut to, famously, anthracite coal—were deployed in the houses Goff built.
His interest in new and experimental materials—a section of the exhibition titled “Plastic Futures” explores Goff’s use of Plexiglas and other cutting-edge technologies—drives his artistic practice as well. Three large panels in hues of gold, red and aqua, titled “Ode to an Imaginary Ballet” (1970-75) deploy lenticular plastic, flexible sheets embedded with small lenses that create visual effects, giving the images an illusion of depth and movement.
Rounding the corner out of the “Object Atlas,” a black painted wall is hung almost floor-to-ceiling with twenty-two of his abstract compositions (a small sample of the 400 Goff paintings in the archive). The vibrant color combinations, the patterns that undulate through or explode off the paper, the strange organic-looking forms and palpable sense of energy of these works: Nothing, not the glimpses of Goff’s curios and collections, nor a sense of the zeitgeist he swam in, really prepares the viewer for this spectacular demonstration of his creativity.
For Fisher this imaginative facility and willingness to experiment with the materials of his moment, his interest in popular technology and culture, like television, ground Goff’s particular mode of modernity and help describe his architectural process, in contrast to some of the other modernist architects of his era.
“Mies, although he was visionary in his time, was really looking back at Neoclassicism as one of his models,” says Fisher. “Goff’s looking at ‘Star Trek.’ I mean, just the difference in approach is striking and you feel like these buildings are of their time. They’re designed for the way people live at that moment and not before.”
In “Goff on Goff” the architect offers a similar description of his approach. “Actually, very few of us live in our time, and I realized that I wasn’t living in my own time much, either.” To uncover the “possibilities of architecture,” then, he begins “to look not into the future, but into the present more, to try to see what we were not utilizing of the present.”
It is remarkable then how Goff’s use of everyday objects, his deep investigations into the present, led him to create some of the most fantastical, forward-looking, far-out residential architecture of not only his but of all time.
His most extravagant, ambitious projects, like two of his now-gone Oklahoma residences, the three-story, spiraling skyward Bavinger House (1945-50) in Norman, and Shin’en Kan (1952-53), the home and gallery he built for his patrons Joe and Etsuko Price in Bartlesville, are rife with such ideas: pod-like enclosures that drift through the air, loosely draped in rope, coal and cullet-studded exterior walls, a goose-feather-clad ceiling and deep circular conversation pit.
His smaller designs are just as impressive, like “Venus,” a roadside soft-drink bar, proposed but never realized in Wichita, Kansas, a dirigible-shaped structure next to tall triangular silos, which might be mistaken for an outpost on Mars. Or the small ski lodge he did build *in Crested Butte, Colorado, which as Goff depicts, perched in some high snowy mountain aerie, might be home to a mythic Viking king, who has left his golden ice trident out to dry.
Still he approached the details of his client’s lives in an entirely pragmatic way. In describing his 1952 Garvey House, built for a musical family in Urbana, Illinois, Goff considered such questions as how a private home could also be a public performance space, how to create a space where many musicians could practice without disturbing one another and how to orient the driveway so that cars could pull in and out without posing a risk to children playing in the street. The resulting circular structure is wild but the quest remains to establish everyday logistics.
One of the crowd-pleasing moments in the exhibition is a player piano performing a Goff composition created specifically for the instrument, the piano roll itself a standalone work of art. On my visit it was surrounded by people who were drawn less perhaps by Goff’s experimental music than by the machine’s ghostly operation, the piano keys moving independent of any human player, the sound emanating from a familiar object turned strange and fascinating. It’s an apt touchstone for Goff and the alchemy of his art and architecture.
Goff said, “You can have architecture for architects’ sake or you can have architecture for people,” but in many ways we, the people and the architects, are still catching up with Goff: how much he accomplished—150 of his designs realized despite many hundreds more that never were—how original and daring an artist he allowed himself to become and how much he encouraged others to find their own individual creativity, how fully he saw his moment and thrived despite it.
No doubt there would have been even more Goff if his moment had been able to fully see him too. He became chair of architecture at the University of Oklahoma, from 1947-1955, developing a program that continued his penchant for building collaborative creative spaces, only to be driven out by the homophobia of the McCarthy Era, resigning his post despite support from many at the University. He and Richard San Jule discussed building a home together, even purchasing land in Kentucky, but San Jule died unexpectedly after an operation in 1946 and their dream went unrealized.
But Goff moved on and “Material Worlds” follows him. It is a fascinating and fantastical exhibition, an opportunity to engage the possibilities—creative, radical, communal—of not just architecture, not just art, but the world itself.
