BRUCE GOFF: TOWARD ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE
David G. De Long

David G. De Long: BRUCE GOFF: TOWARD ABSOLUTE ARCHITECTURE. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988. First Edition. A fine hardcover book in a fine dust jacket with a couple of tiny, closed tears to the upper edge of the DJ. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.

10.5 x 10.5 hardcover book with 388 pages and 33 color and 321 b/w photographs and illustrations. This oversized volume is the definitive Bruce Goff monograph.

Bruce Alonzo Goff (1904-1982) and his family settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1915. His father recognized his son's immense talent for drawing, and arranged for him to apprentice with the firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush of Tulsa. In 1929 Goff was made a partner.

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 Œsixties, 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.

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