Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles

Commissioned in 1979 and completed in 1988, the Al Struckus House is a four-story cylindrical structure standing on a lush, hilly site in Woodland Hills, a neighborhood in northwestern Los Angeles. Clad in dark brown redwood and tan stucco, the house also features a column of distinctive domed windows and decorative glass tile making it appear both part of and distinct from the terrain, or in Ireland’s words “looking both like a structure from another world and like one that could exist only right here in Los Angeles, on that exact lot near the edge of the San Fernando Valley.”

Ireland’s photographs of buildings often focus the viewer’s attention on an unexpected detail, texture, or vantage in order to reveal the lived experience of a space or place. For this project, she concentrated on Goff’s inventive use of materials and his unique architectural features. Her photographs describe the house’s open volume and its dizzying interior space, as well as the diverse material elements that define the experience of living in the house like mesh netting, radial floor joists, rose carpet, and rotating circular closets with rope curtain doors.

Sensitive to the way photographs can flatten the experience of space, Ireland captured distinctive views of this unusual structure: “I don’t know whether my photographs can provide an accurate sense of its internal logic, but I hope they offer a sense of its magic.”

Janna Ireland: A Goff House in Los Angeles is curated by Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator, Architecture and Design, and Craig Lee, assistant curator, Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. 

The exhibition complements the retrospective Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, on view in the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall, December 20, 2025–March 29, 2026.