The Man Who Made Wildly Imaginative, Gloriously Disobedient Buildings

Bruce Goff’s midcentury houses across the Midwest are symbols of both a heartland-born eccentricity and a distinct Modernism. So why has he been forgotten?

The vivid lavender 1962 Gryder House in Ocean Springs, Miss., is one of roughly 150 remarkable structures realized by the largely forgotten architect Bruce Goff. Still occupied by the son of the couple who built it, the house is fronted by a reflecting pool and has conical balconies off each bedroom.CreditCreditElena Dorfman

By Amanda Fortini

AURORA, ILL., 45 miles west of Chicago, lies deep in suburbia: It’s the fictional setting of “Wayne’s World” and the real-life setting of my adolescent weekends at the mall. Behind a commercial strip lined with big-box stores, among the split-levels and center-hall colonials, in the kind of neighborhood where kids run through sprinklers on summer weekends, crouches a massive mushroom-cap dome, 48 feet in diameter. Formed by bright red Quonset hut ribs and flanked by two smaller partial domes, the structure — whose windowless front is done in inky coal masonry studded with rough-hewn chunks of aquamarine glass — looks like a spaceship that’s pulled up its jet bridge. From the back, where its red exoskeleton is exposed, it resembles a birdcage. This is the Ford House, designed in 1947 by Bruce Goff, a prolific and startlingly original midcentury architect who remains, outside of design circles, largely unknown.

When one thinks of the architecture of the Midwest, one thinks, of course, of the elegantly autocratic Frank Lloyd Wright and his Prairie School houses: With their tiers of low-pitched roofs, jutting eaves and bands of leaded-glass windows, these homes came to define organic Modernism and redefine the relationship between environment and habitation. One thinks, too, of Wright’s mentor, Louis Sullivan, who is regarded as the father of Modern architecture for first uttering the phrase “form ever follows function” but who is probably better known for the eight jewel-box banks he built in Midwestern towns.

Yet now, in our era of elegantly restrained and frequently dour minimalism, when architecture is almost always the province of the rich, it may be that Goff, with his aesthetic idiosyncrasies and affinity for middle-class Midwestern clients (schoolteachers, farmers, salesmen, small-town newspaper publishers), still has lessons to teach us, 36 years after his death. His daring, elaborately imagined homes — he loved unusual shapes and made ample use of found materials — are often dismissed by cultural mandarins as overly futuristic and corny, but they possess a warmth, an earthiness and a wild ingenuity that serve as an antidote to the soberly luxurious, the pared down and the austere.

Among Goff’s unconventional masterworks was the Bavinger House, designed in 1950 for artist friends in Norman, Okla. This 96-foot-long logarithmic sandstone spiral coiled around a steel pole from which the architect suspended the roof, the stairs and what he called “five living areas in the shape of carpeted bowls.” The ground floor featured an “indoor water garden,” as Goff put it, through which the Bavingers waded via steppingstones, like characters in a nursery rhyme, to reach the dining area. Here, they sat on carpet-covered foam pads arranged around a revolving mirrored dining table that reflected the moods of the sky. (I like to imagine that marijuana was sometimes involved.)

Then there’s the radically geometric Nicol House, built in Kansas City, Mo., in 1967. An octagonal conversation pit surrounded by octagonal bedrooms — each painted its own deep hue, like blueberry or fuchsia — it also has triangular windows and a hexagonal pool in the yard. Crown-shaped and covered in white fish-scale shingles (they were originally pale green), the house today resembles a frosted vanilla cake. Bill Gryder, who grew up in Ocean Springs, Miss., where he still owns a Goff house — an arresting violet-hued swoop that Dalí could have painted — told me that his flashy, headstrong mother (a housewife married to the owner of a chain of shoe stores) read about Goff’s work in a magazine at the beauty parlor and called to ask him to design her a house. “Her favorite color,” Gryder tells me, “was glitz.” Goff’s homes were not for the minimalist.

His audaciousness may seem surprising given that he built his most important projects in Illinois, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota and Mississippi — in the spiritual Midwest, if not the Midwest proper. Goff designed about 500 structures, roughly a third of which were realized and an unknown number of which survive. Many were private homes constructed during his prolific postwar period, from 1947 to 1955, when he was the chair of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Architecture. A beloved teacher with no interest in cultivating acolytes, the gentle, unassuming Goff taught students to find and shepherd their own creative instincts. But he was also a quiet eccentric who often wore disco-print shirts and bolo ties and decorated his office with oversize silver snowflakes, sheets of translucent plastic and his own abstract paintings. At night, he would gather students in a lecture hall, turn off the lights and play classical records, encouraging them to meditate on their ideas in the dark.

For anyone who has lived in the Midwest, among the hushed suburban conformity and tidy green lawns, it’s not remotely shocking that an untamable imagination like Goff’s could arise from — and was perhaps even animated by — the area’s vast, monotonous landscapes and often conservative attitudes. This is, after all, the region that produced Mark TwainWalt DisneyRichard PryorF. Scott Fitzgerald and the Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Goff could arguably only have worked far from the cultural-elite coasts, in a place where people are not bound by the constraints of space, fashions, tradition, history or even conventional good taste.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO CONSIDER Goff apart from the specter of Wright, with whom he had a complicated friendship. The two men first made contact when the teenage Goff — a prodigy born in small-town Kansas, whose watch-repairman father apprenticed him to the top architecture firm in Tulsa, Okla., at the age of 12 — wrote to the famous older man, who was 37 years his senior, asking whether he should get an architecture degree. Wright cautioned against it, saying that if he went to school, he might “lose Bruce Goff.” Goff listened. By age 15, his first house was under construction. By 21, he’d designed the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in downtown Tulsa, a soaring Art Deco-Gothic masterpiece.

Wright came to view Goff as one of the few truly creative American architects (the establishment was not always so kind), but their relationship was, at least for Goff, always uneasy. The men shared a fascination with geometric invention and the belief that a building should respond to the surrounding natural world. And it was Goff who, in 1952, suggested that the industrialist Harold C. Price hire Wright to build his Bartlesville, Okla., headquarters — Wright’s only high-rise (now an arts center and luxury hotel). But for the most part, Goff held the famous architect at a distance, declining to join the Taliesin Fellowship, the apprenticeship program Wright established on his Wisconsin estate. Goff’s early homes in Chicago gesture toward Wright’s, but by 1940, keenly aware that the architect judged his followers harshly and wary of being compared to him, the younger man began to move in his own direction. “The Wright influence has finally been assimilated,” Goff wrote, “and my own voice, small as it was, was speaking.”

Goff created environments that were unique to each client. Still, his structures shared certain leitmotifs. Most significantly, he favored dramatic geometries: Life magazine noted that he scorned “boxes with little holes” and, in 1948, profiled his Ledbetter House in Norman — a split-level with irregular stone walls and what look like red flying saucers floating over the carport and terrace. His homes were instead spherical, triangular, octagonal, curvilinear, cylindrical. His open floor plans were also unorthodox, as were the colors he used. The 1965 Dace House in Beaver, Okla., a series of silo-like cylinders, was done in rust red, like a barn on the prairie. The 1971 Harder House in Mountain Lake, Minn. — a low-slung, rustic structure that might have emerged from a German fairy tale — had a roof made of carpet in the unmistakable orange of the era.

With his use of vernacular and castoff materials, including salvaged oil-field pipe and jute rope, Goff simultaneously anticipated the age of sustainable architecture and enshrined the flotsam of American industry and mass-product design, elevating everyday items to decorative art. He began incorporating found objects while in a Navy construction battalion during World War II, and he continued this practice even in the absence of wartime shortages. Sequins, old aircraft struts, tin cookie cutters and strips of clear plastic “rain” all appeared in his work. Walls of anthracite coal embedded with bluish-green cullet (waste glass culled from the kiln during glassmaking) became a trademark, as did doors decorated with dime-store ashtrays. The Hopewell Baptist Church in Edmond, Okla., featured a 35-foot chandelier made of metal cake pans and plastic coasters. Aficionados of such ornamental flourishes affectionately call them “Goffitecture.” In another person’s hands, they would have been camp, but Goff did not design with a winking, ironic eye.

His use of uncommon materials reached its apotheosis at Shin’enKan, the 1958 bachelor pad he built for his patron Joe Price — the wealthy son of Harold and one of the world’s foremost collectors of Edo-period Japanese art — and continued to expand upon for the next 18 years. The critic Ada Louise Huxtable called the mansion “a Playboy dream, if Playboy were an architect”: It had a hexagonal white shag-upholstered conversation pit in a capacious main room that seated 75, exterior walls covered in gold-anodized aluminum, cabinets of African zebra wood and a ceiling appliquéd with white goose feathers.

 

TODAY, MANY OF GOFF’S HOUSES are crumbling, with no cult of restoration-minded architectural buffs working to save them. Two of his greatest creations have been destroyed entirely: Shin’enKan, which Joe Price donated to the University of Oklahoma in 1985, burned down in a 1996 arson; a few years ago, after more than a decade of neglect, the Bavinger House was razed by the son of its original owners.

There are several reasons Goff’s legacy has been more or less forgotten: his unfashionable taste for embellishment with what some would call junk; his indifference to branding and refusal to develop a signature style; and his being a gay man in the mid-20th century in less-than-progressive Oklahoma. (In 1955, he was forced to resign from the university after being arrested for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”) It also doesn’t help that one of his few public buildings, the magnificent Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which houses much of Joe Price’s collection, came at the end of his career (and was finished posthumously by the architect Bart Prince).

But his obscurity also stems in part from the fact that he worked far from the corridors of cool. His homes celebrated his clients’ modest roots without condescension (they were his roots, too) or heartland clichés. His work shows us what Midwesterners have always known, and what people have recently begun to say quite vociferously: that there has long been a strain of creative radicalism in places discounted as having none.

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With a four-story main cylinder and five smaller interlocking cylinders, the Struckus House resembles a totem pole.CreditElena Dorfman

After his university departure, Goff worked for another 27 years, right up until his death in 1982 — he lived for a time in Wright’s Bartlesville high-rise, then moved to Kansas City and later to Tyler, Tex. — but never quite regained the momentum of his early career. His gravesite on the North Side of Chicago is marked by a triangular plaque cast in bronze that reads “Bruce Goff Architect” in the Art Deco font he used to sign his sketches. It’s adorned with a hunk of turquoise cullet salvaged from the burned remains of Shin’enKan.

But a mere hour to the west sits the Ford House, a spectacular emblem of his relevance. Inside, a domed ceiling of pale cypress in a meticulous chevron pattern arcs to meet midnight-black coal walls. In the soft winter light, the aquamarine glass gleams like unmined gemstones. Standing there, you realize that Goff’s designs possess a beauty and rigor that gets obscured by their playfulness; he’s like Twain, another quintessentially American genius, with a seriousness lurking just beneath his puckish surface.

Goff’s work, the scholar David G. De Long has written, “broadened levels of acceptance of the original and the untried.” That was no small feat in the Midwest at midcentury, and it’s not a minor one now. His oeuvre stands as a reminder that weirdness in unexpected precincts can be electrifying and edifying. Of course, in its rebuke to conformity, it can also be terrifying. “If you’re frightened of difference,” Sidney Robinson, the architect and historian who bought the Ford House in 1986, tells me, “this is a very unsettling place.”

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