Critics and historians have had a hard time determining whether architect Bruce Goff was an eccentric or a genius. He began practicing architecture shortly after World War I and remained active until his death in 1982, leaving behind buildings and unrealized projects that were so highly personal they defy comparison with those of his contemporaries.
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Design for the Continuous Present, a retrospective exhibit of Goff’s designs at the Art Institute, seems to indicate that many of Goff’s projects were more important as conceptual than as physical structures. Some of it makes you wonder what he could have had in mind. Many of the drawings and all of the models are of unbuilt projects, and it’s not difficult to see why they remain unrealized. The plan for the Garvey House, designed for two University of Illinois musicians in 1952, called for spheroid rooms connected by a spiraling tube; walls made of a wire mesh encased in a translucent plastic suggest the flare of a trumpet. Similarly unbuildable was the Al Dewlen Aparture of 1956, whose podlike rooftops were to be made of a fabric sprayed with an aluminum coating. Although curator Pauline Saliga refers to this as “pushing materials beyond their known limitations,” even David DeLong, Goff’s admiring biographer, notes in his catalog essay that such work amounts to self-parody.
By the 1940s Goff’s architecture began to combine natural and personal expression. Spirals, curves, and arcs replaced straight walls with regularly angled junctures. Walls were ultimately eliminated altogether; instead, free-standing platforms, typically suspended by cables, floated on different levels, breaking up the space. Pools, rock formations, and other exterior elements were regularly brought indoors.
