A.D. PROFILES 16: BRUCE GOFF
John Sargeant and Stephen Mooring [Guest Editors]
John Sargeant and Stephen Mooring [Guest Editors]: A.D. PROFILES 16: BRUCE GOFF. London: Architectural Design Magazine, 1978. First edition. Quarto. Thick printed wrappers. 96 pp. Illustrated in color and black and white. Spine worn and faint signs of handling. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good or better copy.
8.75 x 11 perfect-bound softcover journal with 96 pages of color and black and white images relating to the career and buildings of Bruce Goff.
Includes material for many of Goff’s built and unbuilt projects, including Boston Avenue Methodist-Episcopal Church, the Page Warehouse, the Traer Home, the Seabee Chapel, the Ledbetter House, the Ford House, the Crystal Chapel, the Avinger House, the Wilson House, the Dewlap “Aperture” Project, the Grader House, the Guttmann House, the Dace House, the Price House, the Plunkett House, the Glen and Loretta Harder House, the Jason and Anna Harder House, and the Tucson Barby House.
Largely self-educated, Bruce Goff (1904–1982) employed a free-association technique in creating his designs. Goff lacked the usual academic credentials but was made a full professor in the University of Oklahoma architecture program, where his classes placed a high value on techniques to stimulate creativity. Goff's private practice offered clients an organic architecture, a further development of concepts laid down by Frank Lloyd Wright. His strong individualism is evident in the improbable but surprisingly functional homes he built in the plains states.
Exposed structure and spatial complexity characterize a Bruce Goff design, further complicated by a degree of decorative detailing that set his work apart from the minimalist tendencies of his contemporaries' buildings.
Goff completed almost thirty projects by age 22 -- the massive Boston Avenue Methodist-Episcopal Church in Tulsa being one of the most striking. Goff became aware of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan (Wright's early employer) while at Rush, Endacott & Rush. Goff corresponded extensively with both men, their influence strongly in evidence in Goff's early work. He drew inspiration also from the artists Maxfield Parrish, Erté, and Gustav Klimt.
In 1934 Goff found himself in Chicago, Illinois, employed by Alfonso Iannelli -- a brief association that the 30-year-old architect found stifling. Supporting himself with freelance work, he was offered a part-time teaching post at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts where he explored theories on "free architecture" as a consequence of his proximity to artists working in abstraction. Just because buildings were meant to serve practical ends, he told his students, this did not mean that architecture was by any means exempt from the need to break new artistic ground as objects of beauty.
While in Chicago, the composer Goff saw his "piano music of a radically different order" begin to find an audience. There he designed several residences and worked for the manufacturer of Vitrolite, a patented form of architectural sheet glass introduced during the 1930's. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II, eventually to design numerous military structures as well as residences for colleagues.
After his stint in the Navy, Goff returned to architectural practice briefly in Berkeley, California, then accepted a teaching position with the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma in 1942. By 1943 he was chairman of the school. In his nine years at OU Goff's private practice soared, garnering important critical attention. Two of his most famous residence projects, the Ruth Ford house in Illinois, and the Eugene Bavinger house near the OU campus in Norman, Oklahoma, were built during this period.
In 1955 Goff left Oklahoma University to relocate his practice in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He set up his studio in the Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright's tallest building. He was the ideal artist of the 1960s, expressing a freedom from convention and intellectual abandon much in vogue in the popular media. To international tastes, Goff typified the American artistic free spirit of the ‘sixties, and his work entered the international arena. Goff's designs and ideas were featured in publications including Progressive Architecture, Art in America, and Architectural Forum.