THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUCE GOFF 1904 – 1982:
DESIGN FOR THE CONTINUOUS PRESENT
Pauline Saliga and Mary Woolever [Editors]
Pauline Saliga and Mary Woolever [Editors]: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUCE GOFF 1904 – 1982: DESIGN FOR THE CONTINUOUS PRESENT. Chicago/New York: The Art Institute of Chicago/Prestel, 1995. Quarto. Thick printed wrappers. 120 pp. Illustrated in color and black and white. Fore edge slightly lifted and faint signs of handling. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.A very good to nearly fine copy.
9 x 11.75 perfect-bound softcover book with 120 pages of color and black and white images culled from Goff's comprehensive archive, complementing the 1995 Art Institute of Chicago major retrospective exhibition titled The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904-1982: Design for the Continuous Present.
- Foreword: James N. Wood
- Acknowledgments: Pauline Saliga, Mary Woolever and Sidney K. Robinson
- Introduction: Jack Golden
- Bruce Goff Reconsidered: David G. De Long
- Bruce Goff and Music: Sidney K. Robinson
- Bruce Goff in Chicago: Timothy Samuelson
- Bruce Goff, Teacher and Mentor: Philip B. Welch
- A Personal Recollection of Bruce Goff: Joe D. Price
- Plates
- Bruce Goff's Built Works: Annemarie van Roessel
- Chronology
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
Includes material for many of Goff’s built and unbuilt projects, including Boston Avenue Methodist Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma [1926]; Riverside Studio, Tulsa, Oklahoma [1928]; Turzak House, Chicago, Illinois [1938]; Ledbetter House, Norman, Oklahoma [1947]; Bavinger House, Norman, Oklahoma [1950]; John Frank House, Sapulpa, Oklahoma [1955]; Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California [1978].
From The Art Institute of Chicago: Bruce Goff (1904–1982) was one of the most inventive and iconoclastic architects of the twentieth century. Born in Kansas, he spent most of his life practicing in Oklahoma, Chicago, and Texas. In addition to his pursuit of “design for the continuous present” through architecture, Goff was also an artist and in the 1930s, a composer of modern piano compositions.
Apart from his own innate creativity, Goff found inspiration for his work from a variety of sources, including the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaudí, Erich Mendelsohn, modern European fine arts and music, and the arts of Japan and Southeast Asia.
In a career that spanned more than six decades, Goff saw almost a hundred and fifty of his architectural designs—of a total oeuvre of more than five hundred—built in fifteen states. While the majority of his projects were private residences, commercial and civic buildings appeared throughout in both large and small-scale commissions. In each of these designs, Goff's sensitivity to client, site, space, and material set him apart from the mainstream.
Goff also profoundly influenced a younger generation of architects through his teaching at the University of Oklahoma, apprenticeships, and lectures and is regarded as one of the masters of organic architecture in the United States.
In 1990, The Art Institute of Chicago received Goff's comprehensive archive through the Shin'enKan Foundation, Inc. and Goff's executor, Joe Price. Additional donations have been received from various sources. In 1995, The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major retrospective exhibition of his work, with an accompanying catalog, The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904-1982: Design for the Continuous Present.
Largely self-educated, Goff 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.