Art Institute exhibit on Bruce Goff spans 20th century architecture

The groundbreaking architect Bruce Goff has never achieved widespread name recognition, even though his projects were featured multiple times in Time and Vogue magazines and endorsed by high-profile peers Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright.

It didn’t help that Goff was both an architectural insider and outsider. While he headed a university architectural school and was well connected within the field, he spent most of his life in Oklahoma far from design centers. His highly original, ever-changing buildings never fit comfortably into any movement or style.

“His work is idiosyncratic. It’s very unconventional. He wanted every project to be individual,” said Alison Fisher, the Art Institute of Chicago’s curator of architecture and design.

That individuality threads through the more than 200 models, architectural drawings and artworks on display in “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” which opened Saturday at the Art Institute and runs through March 29.

Fisher and Assistant Curator Craig Lee surveyed Goff’s more than 60-year career for the large-scale exhibition, the first in Regenstein Hall’s new temporary space south of the museum’s Asian galleries. (The museum is shuffling galleries to accommodate its forthcoming Grainger Center for Conservation and Science.)

The show is taking place 30 years after the last Goff survey at the Art Institute. Curators hope it will further heighten his profile and also fill gaps about what is known about the architect.

A high-profile 2018 article in T, the New York Times Style Magazine helped spur the project on. “We just felt like there was interest there from young people and non-architectural audiences so we could broaden the appeal of Goff for a new generation,” Fisher said.

Why does such an exhibition make sense for the Art Institute? For starters, Goff moved to Chicago in 1934 after the Great Depression led to the dissolution of the Tulsa architectural firm where he got his start. He remained in the city until his enlistment in the U.S. Navy in 1942.

Goff designed two houses in Chicago, including the Bachman House, a 1940s remodeling of an 1889 wood house at 1244 W. Carmen Ave. that features an unconventional, angular exterior with brick and corrugated aluminum cladding. In addition, five of Goff’s residential designs were spread around the North Shore (one is no longer ) as well as the Ford House in Aurora (1947-1950).

Perhaps even more important, the Art Institute acquired in 1990 Goff’s architectural archive, which includes 8,000 drawings, plus his art collection and other possessions. That cache adds to its holdings of materials by other notable architects, such as Bertrand Goldberg and Harry Weese. About 80% of the objects in this exhibition are drawn from the museum’s holdings.

Goff’s career starts with the beginning of his teenage apprenticeship at age 12 and runs up to his death in 1982 – an extraordinary span of 20th century architectural history. His work draws on, yet transcends, myriad styles from Art Deco and European modernism to organic and roadside architecture.

Through it all, he maintained an ever–evolving approach that was flamboyant, often futuristic and always highly personal, sometimes incorporating a range of unexpected materials from shag carpeting and glass cullet (unprocessed chunks of blue-green glass) to coal and goose feathers.

“He’s kind of a chameleon,” Fisher said. “He doesn’t stick to one style. It’s not like – ‘That’s a Goff!’ – necessarily.”

The architect devoted himself primarily to residences and designed few attention-grabbing commercial or public buildings that were realized. A notable exception, which is represented in the Art Institute show by a model and other artifacts, is his 1988 Japanese pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was completed after his death.

“He wanted it that way,” Fisher said. “I don’t think fame was something he sought very actively, because he had a really robust building career. He really enjoyed working with everyday people. We talk in the catalog about his clients ranging from artists to turkey farmers.”

This exhibition bombards the viewer with Goff’s dizzying array of creative stimuli, ranging from his collection of “realia” — objects such as an interlocking Octons Toy or a 9½-inch-wide amethyst crystal — to his diverse art collection. His art holdings included Native American paintings and more than 800 Japanese woodblock prints now held in the Art Institute’s Arts of Asia department.

At different points in his life, Goff devoted himself equally to music (one of the player-piano rolls he composed can be heard in the show), architecture and art. The show contains multiple examples of his 500 paintings, technically sophisticated compositions that draw variously on abstract-expressionism, psychedelia and cosmology and include collaged materials like fake fur.

The show is organized more or less chronologically to make it more accessible for visitors who might not have much familiarity with Goff’s work, but clusters of objects are grouped around key themes in the architect’s life at the same time.

Highlights include:

• “Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church South, Perspective” (1928), graphite and pastel with touches of opaque watercolor. Goff designed this Art Deco church when he was working at the architectural firm Rush, Endacott and Rush in Tulsa. “His church there is just a stunner – really one of the most beautiful religious buildings I’ve ever seen,” Fisher said.
• “Three-Panel Screen” (1942). This 68-inch-tall screen was designed and fabricated by Goff for the Bachman House in Chicago. With its collaged piano roll and handpainted elements, it shows nearly every side of his creativity. “So, for me, that’s really special,” Fisher said. “We talked about it as a Rosetta Stone of Goff’s practice.” 
• “Gryder House, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Perspective” (1960), graphite on tracing paper. Goff designed this house with its sweeping curves and tubelike entryway with Robert Kramer. Fisher called this rendering a “spectacular drawing” that is virtually identical to photos of the finished home. “He’s often called a visionary,” she said, “but that implies someone whose drawings were not realizable, and this proves that they were absolutely buildable.”

The exhibition design, overseen by New Affiliates, a New York architectural firm led Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb, seeks to mimic Goff’s daring, unconventional vision with a funky font for some of the signage and sleek white display cases, curvilinear lines and hot-pink backdrops.