Bruce Goff’s Fabulous (and Bedazzled) Material Worlds

Among the many eye-catching objects within Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, is an analog tool used by every designer and architect. This object, a T-square, is made of translucent, neon yellow plastic. Some of the numbers on the blade have been rubbed off through use, but at its head, the T-square retains a fabulous, very Goffian twist. It has been bedazzled with mirrored geometric shapes in sliver, teal, and orange, the resulting tool conveying a kind of Art Deco infused futurism through everyday object craft work.

The T-square is a tool of Bruce Goff’s craft that he couldn’t help but festoon with decoration in order to make it his own. It simultaneously expresses his identity and clarifies his visual interests in a way that should be familiar with anyone who has decorated a sweatshirt with puffy paint, wrapped their laptop or water bottle in stickers, or anointed a denim jacket in rhinestones.

Bruce Goff (1904–1982) was an architect that so desired the objects around him to evoke character and personality that not even his T-square, or the tubes he would use to transport architectural drawings in, were safe from customization—or bedazzlement. On his body, he rejected the cliché black clothing that architects were known to wear in favor of velvet pants and polyester shirts covered in brightly colored, swirling patterns. Around his neck, he wore one of the many delicately inlaid silver bolo ties in his vast collection.

At home, and at work as a practicing architect or an educator at a university, whether in Chicago, California, Oklahoma, Kansas or Texas, he hung disco balls and gold lamé curtains, covered the walls with vibrant Native American tapestries, and decorated with ornate Japanese art. Goff spent his free time watching episodes of Star Trek and reading science fiction magazines like Omni, listening to Claude Debussy, composing music, and prolifically creating abstract paintings.

Many of these objects, which Art Institute of Chicago Architecture and Design curator Alison Fisher and assistant curator Craig Lee refer to as realia—objects and material of everyday life that serve a didactic purpose—are found in the Bruce A. Goff Archive within the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives. “I hope that one of the takeaways of seeing all of these objects is that inspiration abounds in everything around us,” shares Craig Lee in an interview with the author.¹ Craig mentions two items in the exhibit, both collected by Goff, that illustrate his point. “It can be something simple as a colored plastic toy puzzle you have on your desk that might be an inspiration for an architectural design, or something more artistic, like a Gustav Klimt.” The low culture and the high culture are embedded in both the things that Goff collected and the buildings that he created, and the many paintings he would make over his lifetime.

These paintings, or “collages” we learn through Material Worlds, were an appendage of his practice as an architect before the Alton, Kansas-born, self-taught Bruce Alonzo Goff even knew he wanted to be one. An early inspiration for Goff was his self-taught painter great-grandmother, who collected shells, feathers, and crystals. Goff continued to make art across his life, and that artwork evolved as he gained knowledge of the world around him, and as he discovered new materials and techniques. When Goff’s career began to evolve from designing to lecturing and teaching, he would scour hobby shops and art supplies stores for new kinds of glitter, varnish, and even spray paint to work into his collages.

It’s these proclivities that make Bruce Goff more Liberace than Le Corbusier—a creative with flamboyant personal tastes that gave him the means to create even more flamboyant works of architecture. All these objects, hobbies, art, and collections would whirl around in Bruce Goff’s imagination and become a source of inspiration for some of the most original architecture that would ever be produced—or proposed—by an architect in the United States. Goff’s buildings are glorious, futuristic, and pop. They hover, take flight, swirl, and frolic, crawl across the ground, and duplicate like prisms. They make use of both object and form, and become banks, motor lodges, soft drink bars, single-family homes, and museums. For the 1928 Riverside Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a home and workspace for pianist Patti Adams Schriner, he adorned a window at the front of the studio with decorative patterns derived from a musical score he had composed while working on the design for the building. For the 1950 Ruth and Sam Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, Goff utilized the ribs of a Quonset hut—a form he would become familiar with during service in the US Navy—as a structural system. For an unbuilt 1955 competition entry for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, Goff arranged horseshoes around a stake, giving each horseshoe a programming function.

Bruce Goff: Material Worlds shines a series of glimmering mirrored facets on Bruce Goff’s inspirations and his work, and provides new perspectives on his individuality as it is the first of its kind to engage with Bruce Goff as a queer architect and creative. It takes visitors on a trip through the stuff of Goff’s life that served as a catalyst for the incredible creativity he would convey through architecture.

The exhibition, designed by New York-based New Affiliates, sets Goff’s collages, drawings, and realia inside shapely display cases, each with a shock of neon apricot within. The vibrant color provides a playful, energetic background for items like carpet samples, Bruce Goff’s disco ball, and even his US Navy dog tags. Turning the corner to view a gallery-style wall of Goff’s collages, the neon apricot appears again, this time in one of Goff’s futuristic compositions that upon closer inspection, includes a field of foil star stickers. The drawings, shown largely in chronological order, begin in 1914 with a pencil sketch drawn of a cathedral by a ten-year-old Bruce Goff, a conveyance of an attraction to architecture, and a talent for illustration, that would allow Goff to begin a career in the field early in his life. Elsewhere, a player piano twinkles away, performing a jazzy, arpeggiated musical arrangement composed by Bruce Goff in the 1930s. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see items Goff custom designed to adorn the buildings he designed, including a door from the Eugene and Nancy Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma, and a table and chairs created for the Etsuko and Joe Price House, Shin’enKan, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, that would have looked right at home on the set of the original Star Trek series.

Bruce Goff’s interest in pastimes that were quirky and brainy, and in objects that were colorful, lamé, glam, or glittered, have a distinguishably queer flavor, and Material Worlds allows that aspect of who Goff was to flourish. Bruce Goff existed in the world as what would contemporarily amount to a level of self-disclosure of an openly gay man, although it is complicated to apply modern monikers regarding gender, emotional connections, and sexuality to people who lived in a time when there were few ways to describe queer life, queer art, and queer architecture. Being “out” in the modern parlance during Bruce Goff’s life, until the last few decades, meant that a person might risk their employment, their housing, their social status, and even their safety. Goff outweighed the hazards of being queer to being his own person, and he suffered for it. He was the victim of episodes of moral panic on the part of the universities where he taught, and the clients who might hire him.

Historical and personal events would profoundly affect Bruce Goff’s life, and would require him to move his home, architecture, and teaching practices across states and the country. Born in Alton, Kansas, on June 8, 1904, Bruce Goff lived in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Denver with his family before spending his teenage years in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the age of twelve, Goff began apprenticing at the firm of Rush, Endacott & Rush, and by fifteen, he designed and erected his first commission: a summer house in Los Angeles, California.² Through the library at Rush, Endacott & Rush, Goff would come to know the work of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, and initiated correspondence between each of them. Goff became a partner at the firm in 1929, but the Great Depression would cause it to dissolve in 1932. His four-year marriage to Evelyn Hall would also end that year, and at Iannelli’s suggestion, he moved to Chicago in 1934.

It is through a section of the exhibit titled “Chicago Blues” and an essay in the exhibition catalog titled “The Queer Modernism of Bruce Goff and Richard San Jule” by Scott Herring, we learn more about the significance of Goff’s time in Chicago. In the 1930s, Goff began a love affair with poet Richard San Jule. The couple, who were both married to women prior to their relationship, shared an apartment and workspace in Park Ridge, Illinois, and then at 1515 Howard Street in Rogers Park.³ “This moment in Chicago is such a rich period for Goff, but it’s also a restart for both Goff and San Jule,” shares Lee. Goff initially found employment in Chicago at the Vitrolite division of the Libby-Owings-Corning Glass Company and would later begin teaching at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts while starting an independent architecture practice.

Bruce Goff’s experience at Rush, Endacott & Rush, where his professional development and curiosity was encouraged as an apprentice, followed Goff as an educator, an architecture school director, and in practice as an architect for the rest of his professional life. He would build a rich social and professional network of former students, proteges, and patrons that would help him complete projects both remotely and later, posthumously.

While in Chicago, San Jule and Goff made plans to develop an artist colony they would name Kebyar, a Balinese word meaning “the sudden bursting open of a flower” in Louisville, Kentucky, where Goff had purchased property.

World War II would disrupt the plans to create Kebyar and would require Goff to leave his practice and his teaching in Chicago behind. In 1942, Goff entered the US Navy, and upon receiving his discharge papers in 1945, he opened an architectural office, curiously, in Berkeley, California. It is not known when during this time in Goff’s life that his relationship with San Jule ended. Richard San Julie died in Chicago in 1946; Goff was not mentioned in his obituary.

In 1947, Goff, presenting himself as an openly gay man, would be appointed chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Goff’s time in Norman initiated a period of incredible creativity and productivity. He would design a number of imaginative single-family dwellings in Norman and continue to refine the art and practice of his teaching style as an educator. “What Goff taught while he was chair was a curriculum to foster each student’s own independence and individuality. That principle carries over into how he approached mentorship and teaching,” shares Lee. In 2020, the University of Oklahoma College of Architecture celebrated this era of Goff’s career through an exhibit titled Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture. The Renegades exhibit explored Goff’s influence on both students and the institution. A McCarthy-era homophobic sting in Norman in 1955 would lead to Goff’s arrest and force his resignation as chair of the Department of Architecture despite broad support from both administration and students.

Goff relocated to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, establishing a practice in the newly built Price Tower, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for oil entrepreneur Harold C. Price, Sr. Goff would leave Bartlesville for Kansas City, Missouri, in 1964, and then leave Kansas City for Tyler, Texas, in 1970. Tyler would be his home base for the last twelve years of his life, a time that was defined by an international interest in his work that carried him around the world to lecture, including to Europe and Japan. Bruce Goff would die in Tyler on August 4, 1982. Goff is interred at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago under a marker designed by Grant Gustafson, a former apprentice during the years that Goff practiced in Texas.

Taking into consideration the number of times Bruce Goff relocated, it is remarkable that so many objects related to his life and work remain to tell his story. Much of this is perhaps due to longtime Goff patrons Etsuko and Joe Price, whose relationship with Goff began when Joe Price, the son of Harold C. Price, Sr., asked the architect to design a home for him in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1956.⁴ The resulting project, Shin’enKan, was Joe Price’s lush, luxurious bachelor pad, abound with Goffian touches like chunky, irregularly shaped cullet glass (a byproduct of commercial glass manufacturing), antennae like protuberances thrusting from the roofline, and triangular windows, as well as some very familiar elements evocative of Goff’s plastic T-square.

Goff willed his archives to Joe Price and his wife Etsuko who, upon Goff’s death, gifted them to the Art Institute of Chicago. Shin’enKan was destroyed in 1996, the unfortunate result of an act of arson. Another significant work of Goff’s, the 1950 Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma, was demolished in 2016. Bruce Goff’s most well-known work, the Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was completed posthumously in 1988 by architect Bart Prince.

In 1995, The Architecture of Bruce Goff: Design for the Continuous Present opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Created by Bart Prince, University of Illinois at Chicago professor Sydney K. Robinson, as well as Pauline Saliga and Mary Woolever from the Art Institute, the exhibit consisted of over one hundred original Goff drawings and models. Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, presented thirty years later, and in a time period where we wish to understand the specifics of both life and identity that brings architects and designers to the works we know them for, fully unfurls all the facets of Bruce Goff’s life, and brings that context to his architecture. Material Worlds builds on the foundations of the 1995 exhibition but also lays the physical groundwork for future explorations about Bruce Goff, of which there are many, and of which Goff is deserving. How did Goff help make Tulsa, Oklahoma, such a center of American Art Deco? What brought Bruce Goff and Frank Lloyd Wright to a point of convergence in terms of architectural style in the 1950s? What can we learn from the queer architects and designers of the past? Inspiration abounds in Material Worlds, and it is exciting to consider that the next exhibit, analysis, or creative work on Bruce Goff will be seeded from it.

Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, open until March 29, 2026, shows over two hundred of Goff’s works, including architectural drawings, models, and paintings, as well as the realia and collections that inspired the maverick architect. A series of related programs through the winter will highlight aspects of both the exhibit, and other parts of Goff’s life. Three companion expositions open on January 7, the first being photographs of Bruce Goff’s last residential project—the Al Struckus House in Los Angeles—by artist Janna Ireland, and the second, “New Affiliates on Goff’s Domestic Matter,” reimagine Shin’enKan, the Ford House, and the Bavenger House as a series of large-scale drawings by exhibition designers New Affiliates. A third, curated by Janice Katz, Roger L. Weston Curator of Japanese Art, Arts of Asia, will display thirty-five of the over eight hundred Japanese prints given to the Art Institute by Goff’s estate. On January 29, fresh arrangements of Goff’s player piano compositions will be performed by Third Coast Percussion. While Craig Lee is eager for people who are interested in architecture to learn more about Bruce Goff the architect, the companion programming will peel back the layers of Goff’s multifaceted life as a creative individual. Lee concludes, “I hope that people will see the full scope of Goff’s creative practice in architecture, in painting, and in music.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Craig Lee, assistant curator, Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.