Bruce Goff

Bruce Goff'''Bruce Alonzo Goff''' (1904-1982) was an American architect. Born in Alton, Kansas, Goff was a child prodigy who apprenticed at the age of twelve to Rush, Endacott and Rush of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Goff became a partner with the firm in 1930. He is debatably credited, along with his high-school art teacher Adah Robinson, with the design of Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, one of the earliest and finest examples of Art Deco architecture in the United States. After stints in Chicago and Berkeley, Goff accepted a teaching position with the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma in 1942. By 1943, despite a lack of credentials, he was chairman of the school. This was his most productive period. In his private practice, Goff built an impressive number of residences in the American Midwest, developing his singular style of organic architecture that was client- and site-specific. Goff's accumulated design portfolio of 500 projects (about one quarter of them built) demonstrates a restless, sped-up evolution through conventional styles and forms at a young age, through the Prairie style of his heroes and correspondents Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, then out into truly uncharted territory. Goff's mature work has no precedents and, as yet, no heirs. Among his contemporaries these were the years of tight functionalism|functionalistic floorplans, flat roofs, and no ornament; now, even fifty years later, Goff's idiosyncratic floorplans, his attention to spatial effect, and use of recycled and/or unconventional materials such as gilded zebrawood, cellophane strips, cake pans, ashtrays, and white turkey feathers, still have the power to shock and challenge conventional distinctions between order and disorder. Viewed with suspicion and contempt by many in the architectural community, Goff was caught up in a scandal in 1955 (a sexual relationship with one of his students) and lost his university position, a portion of his archives, and much of his reputation. Other significant buildings designed by Goff are the Bavinger House and the Price House in Oklahoma, the Colmorgan House in Glenview Illinois, and the Japanese Art wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Goff died in Tyler, Texas|Tyler, Texas in 1982.