Bruce Goff’s path into architecture was an unusual one that would be difficult to follow today. He was a self-trained architect who felt a formal education in the field would stifle his creativity. And he was right. Goff’s designs and architectural career are important counterbalances to the dominance of modernist principles in twentieth-century architecture.
Born in 1904 in Alton, Kansas, Goff moved often with his family in his youth, eventually settling in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That’s where, at the young age of twelve, he began his career in architecture with an apprenticeship at the firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush. This was the beginning of his architectural education, which he received through experience on the job.
Two years after joining Rush, Endacott and Rush, Goff saw his first home design built. After graduating high school, he decided not to pursue a college degree in architecture. Instead, he spent the 1920s working in Tulsa, where he codesigned the Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church with Adah Robinson. In 1927, he designed the Art Deco Page Warehouse at East 13th Street and South Elgin Avenue. Aesthetically versatile, in 1928, he also experimented with the clean lines of the International Style, designing Riverside Studio for Patti Adams Shriner, a local music teacher.
Today, Goff is celebrated for his unique, organic designs. He was inspired by the architecture of two quintessential American architects, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, but he looked to European examples as well, especially Dutch and German Expressionist architecture. Despite demonstrating his facility with the International Style in Tulsa, he didn’t fall in line with the Modernist movements of the twentieth century. Instead of seeking minimalism and uniformity, he fought for individualism.
By the 1930s, Goff had moved north to Chicago, home to both Sullivan and Wright. Though inspired by these mentors, Goff wasn’t a slave to their design philosophies.
“Each creative artist has the need and the right to be an individual,” he argued later in his career. “Each and every work he does has the need and right to be an individual work, and each and everyone [sic] of his clients are individuals, or groups of individuals, in individual environments, requiring solutions to their needs.”
The Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House, built in 1949–50 in Aurora, Illinois, shows Goff at his finest. The domical single-story dwelling resembles a half-peeled onion, its exterior a combination of exposed Quonset hut ribs and cedar shingles. The circular living space features an elevated platform painting studio for Ruth Van Sickle Ford, with the kitchen placed beneath.
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Describing the organic home, architect and educator Sidney Robinson writes that the house is both “George Jetson and ancient grotto. It is shattered conventions and traditional truths. Its insistent materiality resists abstraction, and its metaphorical potentiality incites imaginings that leave presence far behind.”
Despite never earning an architectural degree, Goff taught part-time at Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1930s. He was hired to teach architecture at the University of Oklahoma in 1947, becoming the department chair the following year. At the time, homosexuality was illegal in Oklahoma, and his position with the architecture department was eventually challenged because of his sexuality. He resigned in 1955, and, a few years later, he relocated to Tyler, Texas, where he would live for the rest of his life.
In addition to his prolific architectural designs, Goff painted throughout his life. The majority of his paintings were non-objective—abstract explorations of color and shape (his architectural sketches combined accuracy and fantasy to stunning effect). Rather than a desire to capture a particular subject, painting was a creative tool. Architectural historian David. G De Long, who knew Goff personally and long studied his career, explains that Goff
Goff’s last design was for the Pavilion of Japanese Art in Los Angeles. Its irregular shape and curvilinear forms show the consistency of his design approach throughout his career. Goff passed away on August 4, 1982, before the pavilion was complete; his former student and colleague, Bart Prince, oversaw the project’s completion.
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In all, Goff created more than 500 designs, with almost 160 of them built. From aesthetic experiments as an apprentice to the mature works at the end his decades-long career, Goff’s oeuvre shows the strengths of following a different path to and through an architectural life.
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