Bruce Goff: Compositions
Born in 1904 in Alton, Kansas, to an economically marginal family who had to move frequently, Goff lived in seven different midwestern towns before settling in Tulsa when he was 12 (he died in Texas in 1982). Seeing his interest in drawing, his father apprenticed him to an architectural firm at that young age, and Goff was soon designing his own buildings. By then he’d also written admiring letters to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Sullivan wrote back commending his enthusiasm and hoping that he would “never outgrow it.” Goff asked Wright whether he should seek formal architecture training, and recalled that Wright responded: “If you want to lose Bruce Goff go to school.” Encouraged by the greatest architects of his day to pursue his own passions, and perhaps feeling marginalized by his fairly rootless childhood and by the fact that he was homosexual, Goff discarded his many architectural influences to design buildings whose shapes look like nothing seen before.
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Goff often quoted Debussy, whose compositions he loved: Debussy wrote that music cannot “be forced into strict traditional forms.” He also cited as an influence Gertrude Stein’s “sense of not being in the past, present, or future tense, but in the ‘continuous present.’” Goff said of the Bavinger House spiral design: “I wanted to do something that had no beginning and no ending.” His artistic struggle was to destroy all givens, to approach each new project as if starting over.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
