A Glimpse into Bruce Goff’s Universe

Although this is most certainly a staged photo, it seems to reveal an intimate moment, showing Goff in an environment of his own making at the OU School of Architecture, which he led from 1947 through 1955.

The room is a cocoon-like space, framed by a dark, gently curving wall that is set off by three framed artworks and an unexpected assortment of objects in the foreground—peacock feathers, a Japanese paper lantern, a Hopi katsina figure, a hanging geometric star, and a trio of suspended ornaments covered with faceted mirror pieces, like tiny disco balls. An unusual ceiling treatment designed by Goff is visible in the background, featuring dried tumbleweeds attached to the ceiling by a network of crisscrossed white string. 

Unexpected and full of mystery, this photograph served as a point of entry for the museum’s upcoming retrospective on Bruce Goff—developed with co-curator Craig Lee—as it vividly illustrates the architect’s broad universe of references. In this one image you can see evidence of Goff’s interest in the arts and cultures of Japan (lantern), his embrace of structures and materials from the natural world (feathers, tumbleweed), his love of sparkle and shine (mirrored ornaments), and his investment in narratives related to his home state of Oklahoma (the framed paintings on the back wall are by well-known Native American artists like local Kiowa painter Woody Big Bow). The photograph also begins to suggest Goff’s unusual ability to bring together materials, colors, textures, and cultural references from wildly different contexts to create cohesive yet radically evocative spatial environments.

A Universe of References

Hints of this synthetic approach can be seen in early projects that show Goff beginning to imagine new architectural forms. In his first decade of practice during the 1920s, Goff often riffed on popular designs of the period, chiefly Art Deco. He designed several buildings in this style while working for the Tulsa architecture firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush, notably the magnificent Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa, a Deco masterpiece.

Having begun as an architectural apprentice at the very young age of 12, by his late 20s Goff was ready to forge his own path. He created a suite of hypothetical studies exploring ideas from German Expressionism to Mayan temples as well as designs like this unbuilt project for a house designed with glass block and blue Vitrolite panels, a structural glass popularized in the 1920s. Here Goff takes Art Deco or Art Moderne geometries to the extreme, using cubic forms not only to create the building’s structure—a complex, interlocking volume—but also as shapes that extend into the landscape through square pavers, linear paths, a reflecting pool, and tall columnar hedges that flicker green and blue on the dark ground.

In this fertile period Goff also began to expand his creative range beyond architecture. He already had an appreciation for visual art, largely explored as a child through international magazines, where he discovered another great master of color and shine, Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. Yet it was a local creative circle in Tulsa that opened new doors. 

Rivaling the avant­-garde spaces one usually associates with 1920s Paris or New York, Goff began holding weekly salons for a tight-knit group of young creatives that included painter Olinka Hrdy, poet and later romantic partner Richard San Jule, composer Ernest Brooks, art teacher Adah Robinson, and dancer Evelyn Hall, Goff’s wife from 1928 to 1932. In his apartment with Hall, Goff threw masquerade parties, experimented with abstract painting, created improvisational musical compositions, started a short-lived arts magazine, and reveled with friends in the many ways of being modern.

This expansion of Goff’s worldview became useful just a few years later, when the Great Depression closed his architecture firm in Tulsa and with it the first chapter of his professional life. Unemployed and newly divorced, Goff found new footing in the city of Chicago, where he moved in 1934 on the invitation of sculptor Alfonso Iannelli. Like many during the Depression, Goff had to learn to be limber, presenting his musical compositions for the player piano, working as a designer for the Libbey­-Owens-­Ford Glass Company, and teaching at a private art school run by Ruth Ford, a future client. 

One of the most extraordinary objects from this period, and one of Goff’s earliest furniture designs, is also a recent museum acquisition: a three-panel screen created in 1942 for Chicago audio engineer Myron Bachman. Goff began by making a simple, black-painted plywood screen, upon which he layered long paper strips cut from a player piano music roll. He united the panels with sinuous forms painted in shiny black lacquer complemented by delicate lines and circles that radiate from the perforations in the paper piano roll. Goff finished the work with more readymades, a variety of stationery store stickers applied in dynamic patterns. While materially modest, this screen performs an important work of synthesis in Goff’s career as well as in our exhibition—showing the culmination of his early interdisciplinary explorations and combining his three most prized art forms: music, painting, and architectural design. 

Created for Bachman’s studio, the screen must have pleased the client, as he commissioned Goff to remodel his modest frame house in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood into a new home and recording studio. The resulting work, a futuristic, aluminum-clad building, was so unusual that it shocked the neighbors in this quiet North Side neighborhood, the first of many such reactions to his fearless approach to modern architecture. 

Goff’s iconoclastic approach to material and form was particularly striking in the postwar period, an era dominated by International style modernism, in which nearly every new building––from skyscrapers and houses to post office buildings––featured uniform grids of glass, steel, and brick. Contrast this minimalist approach with, for example, Goff’s 1965 house for Elaine and Lawrence Hyde in a suburb of Kansas City, which was inspired by a color—green—and a form, the rotated square or equilateral diamond. 

Goff used this angular geometry to detail much of the house, including a triangular fireplace surround and diamond forms on the exterior doors and railings. The color green appears first on the almost black exterior and explodes inside with plush shag carpeting in a dramatic gradient of light to dark tones and a series of custom light fixtures. Goff created each lantern with a rotated grid of nine mass-­produced ­green glass ashtrays inset in octagonal fixtures and finished with long, radiating copper rods.

The final touch in this haptic interior is a showstopping medley of decorations surrounding a suspended metal fireplace at the center of the house. Beginning with a hearth of mint­-green glazed tiles and a sparkly mirror tile surround, Goff illuminated the space with a large skylight, from which he hung plastic “rain”—four panels of thin, scalloped cellophane strips that sparkle in the light and move with currents of air. 

A closer look at Goff’s Hyde house reveals multiple levels of meaning. On the one hand, he has created a gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, that revels in visual effect, more like an art installation than a simple domestic space. On the other hand, Goff’s design can be read as a series of abstract references to natural elements—with green shag carpet standing in for suburban lawn; the skylight bringing in sun; the cellophane, artificial rain; and the modern hearth representing fire—all executed with factory-produced, off-the-shelf materials like glass ashtrays, acrylic carpet, and plastic mirror tile. 

This unusual fusion of the natural and artificial—part of Goff’s signature mix of “high” and “low” materials—is explored to dramatic effect in this winter’s Bruce Goff: Materials Worlds, opening on December 20. The retrospective aims to expand public understanding of Goff’s diverse, often beguiling productions, including his buildings, paintings, musical compositions, and diverse personal collections. With a sculptural installation design by New York firm New Affiliates, the exhibition offers new narratives about Goff’s broad worldview, like his connection to the land and cultures of the Great Plains and engagement with science fiction and queer modernisms, thus making a case for his central place in 20th-century American culture.

—Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator, Architecture and Design

Sponsors

Major support for Bruce Goff: Material Worlds is provided by Jack Butler and John VanderLinden, Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation, and Kathleen Nagle and Ralph Johnson.

Additional support is provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Dirk Denison and David Salkin.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

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