Where to see Bruce Goff’s prolific architecture in Chicago

“Material Worlds,” an exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, offers a glimpse into the unusual mind and prolific creativity of the late architect Bruce Goff, including his music, paintings and architectural drawings.

Goff, who grew up and launched his career as an architect in Oklahoma, spent close to a decade in Chicago, from 1934 to 1942, teaching and developing an independent architectural practice. It was here Goff began to create residences that still to this day overturn preconceived ideas about home design.

Some of those structures still exist, tucked away in neighborhoods from Uptown to Aurora. They may well be homes you’ve driven past, with little more than a small marker to designate their architectural significance.

With a few exceptions, Goff created residents for mainly middle class people living across the Midwest and later Texas. He worked closely with his clients, some of whom became friends and patrons, to design living spaces that were meant to meet their day to day needs even as the final structures appear way ahead of their time. With their circular floorplans, triangular windows and imaginative use of materials, Goff’s homes challenge notions about how we might want to live together.

Goff considered his time in Chicago a potent period in his development. In “Goff on Goff: Conversations and Lectures,” edited by Philip B. Welch, he says “probably nothing I had done previous to the Unseth house in Park Ridge, Illinois…could be called very much my own.”

Here are five Illinois residences that offer locals the opportunity to get a sense of how Goff became Goff. If you go, please be aware these are all private properties and not open to the public or tours.

Helen Unseth House (1940)

808 Park Plaine Ave., Park Ridge

This triangle-shaped house in Park Ridge is one of Goff’s first commissions as an independent architect. Set on a small, wooded lot, it is both respectful of and wildly different from the neighboring houses it sits snugly alongside.

A small storage space stands guard in front of the house, creating a sense of mystery and privacy, a recurring element of Goff’s homes. Diagonal wood boards create triangle covers along the front windows of the house and a vertical row of heavy, clear glass ashtrays punctuate the main entrance, offering a quirky take on porthole windows. A central fireplace culminates in a prismatic skylight which, from the exterior, seems to energetically rise from deep within the house, like tectonic plates shifting skyward.

Many of Goff’s local residences have been carefully preserved or restored, but his other Park Ridge home, the Frank Cole House, was recently torn down.

Charles Turzak Residence (1938-39)

7059 N. Olcott Ave., Edison Park

The Turzak house might seem of a piece with its suburban North Side neighborhood, offering a conventional take on mid-century design. That is, until you realize that Goff designed this house in the late 1930s, long before the modernist craze of the 1950s and 60s.

As with many of his residences, Goff makes ingenious use of the site, in this case a small, narrow corner lot. Set back from the street, its exterior clad in Chicago common brick, the house runs almost the entire length of the property, ending with a glassed-in sunroom, a modification Goff made to the original porch.

The flat-roofed, two-story structure has a large wooden balcony and overhangs, emphasizing the horizontal planes and shifting shape of the structure. The house was also the home studio of Turzak, an artist who made highly stylized woodcuts of various Chicago scenes, among them the Adler Planetarium and Oak Street Beach. Goff ensured natural light was abundant throughout, via narrow vertical windows that line the sides of the house and wrap around some corners.

Chester and Irma Rant House (1938-39)

210 Wagner Road, Northfield

This home has been described by some as “Usonian inspired” and, like the Turzak residence, it does at first glance invoke Frank Lloyd Wright — a significant figure in Goff’s development. The long, low rectangular property is set back off a small winding drive and the use of wood brick and ample glass echoes Goff’s early designs. According to WBEZ contributor Dennis Rodkin, a few years after moving in, the Rants commissioned an addition to the house, designed by Chicago-based architects Perkins & Will.

Myron Bachman Residence (1947-48)

1244 W. Carmen Ave., Chicago

You can’t possibly miss Goff’s Bachman House, a silvery angular structure that resembles a space age vessel from another planet landed in the midst of Uptown. This renovation of a late 19th century structure, undertaken for a local music engineer, demonstrates Goff’s canny use of common materials in surprising ways.

Here he applied the corrugated aluminum typical of a military Quonset Hut to the exterior. This application conceals and dramatizes some of the home’s original elements, including the gable roof with its stunning triangular shaped window design. A large metal overhang bisects the front of the house, dwarfing the small entryway and garage. The current owner has recently been restoring the structure, including replacing the entire metal skin of the house, allowing passersby the opportunity to revisit how this house Goff so stunningly rebuilt came together.

Ruth Van Sickle Ford and Sam Ford House (1949-50)

404 S. Edgelawn Drive, Aurora

After serving in the U.S. Navy Construction Battalion (the Seabees), Goff returned to the Chicago area to create this house for the artist Ruth Ford. The architect first met Ford when she was running the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught. Like many of his creative clients, Ford wanted a residence that would provide space to both make and exhibit paintings. Goff came up with a rather unusual 70-foot gallery wall, using rectangles of anthracite coal interspersed with arrangements of one of his signature materials, aquamarine chunks of cullet glass, which emit a watery light.

The house is a series of circular planes, including a central sunken kitchen, fireplace and long curving couch covered by an overhead open air platform that served as Ford’s studio. Organized around a large pillar, the house's curving walls meet in a massive skylight with an intricate lattice made of Quonset Hut ribs, painted a vivid orange red. Those same ribs form the exterior structure of the home, a bright note of punctuation in its wintry Midwestern environs.

Aurora, with its quaint downtown and many churches, feels a bit like small-town Iowa, so Goff’s design more than stands out, so much so that the Fords erected a sign on their property stating, “We don’t like your house either.” Still, the home was featured in Life Magazine and continues to attract attention. In an onsite interview, current resident and steward of the home, architect Sidney K. Robinson, is careful to clarify that he is not a Goff but a Ford House fan. Having lived there for over three decades, he extols how the house connects with all kinds of people, saying, “Almost anybody can find something. And I think a piece of architecture that invites all kinds of reactions is a great piece of architecture as opposed to one that says, no, you have to know something in order to get it right.”

Bonus stop: Goff’s grave in Graceland Cemetery

4001 N. Clark St., Chicago 

If these five sites don’t satisfy your curiosity about Goff, there are others to visit, including his Paul Colmorgan house in Glenview and Garvey House in Urbana, the latter one of his round house designs. But perhaps the most poignant and poetic stop on a Goff-themed tour is his grave in Graceland Cemetery, home to many of Chicago’s famous architects, including Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan.

At the urging of Goff’s former student Grant Gustafson, the architect’s remains were interred here in 2000, almost 20 years after he died in Texas. Goff left no heirs and his ashes had wound up with one of his patrons, Joe Price. Gustafson, who believed Goff should rest among the other architects who left their mark on Chicago, even designed the curved, triangular gravestone. It fittingly features a fragment of cullet glass, alleged to have been saved from the ruins of Shin’enKan, the Oklahoma home Goff built for Price, which burned to the ground in 1996.