Architecture
Der amerikanische Architekt Bruce Goff galt zu Lebzeiten nicht nur wegen seiner sexuellen Orientierung, sondern auch wegen seiner außergewöhnlichen Designs als Außenseiter. Erst jetzt wird sein Werk ganz neu bewertet.
The American architect Bruce Goff and his unusual designs
Bruce Goff was the ultimate outsider architect. Despite being one of the most innovative, imaginative and interesting architects in history, with admirers such as Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright, Goff (who died in 1982) remains a marginal figure. His exile was partly self-imposed, but there are signs that Goff was also pushed out — as a result of his sexuality as much as his unorthodox design philosophy.
We’ve come to associate US midcentury modernism with minimalism — everything clean, straight and simple. Goff’s buildings were the exact opposite: curvaceous or unconventionally geometric, busy, flamboyant, mysterious. Critics of the era could not understand him. Charles Jencks called him “the Michelangelo of kitsch”. Others described his work as organic, futuristic or sci-fi. He was pop and postmodern before the terms existed. What’s more, not one of Goff’s works looks like another, making him even harder to classify.
Consider one of his most famous works: Bavinger House of 1955. Designed for an artist couple in Norman, Oklahoma, its roofline is a rising spiral hung by cables from a central mast, like a twist of lemon. Its spiralling wall resembles a rockery, covered with boulders, living plants and pieces of reused waste glass. There are no rooms inside; instead, sitting and sleeping areas are round pods radiating from the core. Even with the introduction of computer-aided design, few architects could dream up such a structure. It is like nothing else built before or since. Goff would experiment with form, material, structure and ornament to almost absurd degrees. Materials he used in his buildings included aviation parts, goose feathers, oil rig equipment, orange artificial turf (on the roof), pieces of coal and any kind of glass he could get his hands on. His 1948 Ledbetter House, also in Oklahoma, features a motif of vertical lines of diamond-shaped glass studs set into doors and columns. In fact, they are cheap glass ashtrays.
If Goff was the Michelangelo of kitsch, then his Sistine Chapel was a house known as Shin’en Kan in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Designed over a period of 20 years for a wealthy client named Joe Price, Shin’en Kan had golden roofs and
a sunken “conversation pit” lined with carpeting. For the windows, he created starburst patterns of sequins and glass tubes, originally intended for the artificial insemination of turkeys. A gallery for Price’s collection of Japanese screens had a hexagonal, glass-bottomed pool in the middle. On the floor below was a hexagonal Japanese bathtub, so the pool acted as a skylight, and Price could lie in the bath and look up at his art.
“He was slightly humorous, but at heart he’s a serious architect,” said British architect John Sergeant, whom Goff stayed with when he visited Britain in 1978. “All the houses were very strictly geometrically controlled. I don’t think Goff was able to describe these things in intellectual terms; he just instinctively got them. He picked up the trends, in music, in film, and was very aware of culture. I took him to a record shop in Cambridge and he came away with a suitcase full of great modern classical music — really noisy stuff.”
Goff was an outsider from the start. Born in 1904, he grew up in Oklahoma — way off the cultural radar. Having shown a flair for art as a child, the 12-year-old Goff was taken by his father to a Tulsa architects’ office, where he pleaded with them to give his boy a job. After quickly learning the basics of drafting, he began to produce his own designs. A colleague remarked that his ideas resembled the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Goff had never heard of. So, he wrote to Wright, who replied with words of encouragement and advised him not to study at architecture school and to find his own path.
Goff’s first major work was completed when he was just 22: the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa. It looks like the work of a far older designer, with an art deco spire, ornate detailing and a dramatic circular nave. Experts are certain that Goff was the main designer, though the church was a collaboration with his art teacher, Adah Robinson, who took sole credit for it. Goff’s “flamboyant personality” did not make him popular with the church, according to reports. As one newspaper put it: “Mr Goff’s eccentricities were not well received.”
It got worse when he began teaching at Oklahoma University in 1946. He was an inspirational teacher and, under his leadership, Oklahoma’s architecture school developed an international reputation; but in 1955, he left under a cloud. He had been accused of abusing a 14-year-old boy. Many believe he was set up by rivals uncomfortable with Goff’s sexuality and jealous of his reputation. Goff was open about being gay, and friends describe him as being a kind and gentle soul who would never harm underage boys.
He retreated to the wilderness, but was kept busy by a steady stream of clients. Shin’en Kan was destroyed in a fire in 1996, which many think was arson. Perhaps those walls of coal weren’t such a good idea after all. Bavinger House, too, was destroyed. After the death of its owners, it stood empty and fell into disrepair. It was pulled down, supposedly after being damaged by a storm in 2011.
Many more Goff properties have been lost through lack of care or interest in his reputation — although some, including the Ledbetter House, are now on the National Register of Historic Places. Goff’s reputation is being rehabilitated. The Oklahoma film-maker Britni Harris recently completed a new documentary titled Goff, which premiered at the Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York in October 2019. It begins with a tour of Goff’s 1927 Tulsa Club — once a grand meeting place for the great and good — showing it as a graffiti-covered, burnt-out skeleton. After being restored, the Tulsa Club was saved. It opened as a hotel in April 2019.
Goff didn’t come out of nowhere — his influences included architects Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright, Native American art, and music, especially Claude Debussy. His architecture was truly organic in that it arose out of its inhabitants’ needs, their lifestyles, their interests and their tastes, to the extent, as Sergeant put it, that they were almost “architectural portraits”. While most post-war Americans lived in identical, mass-produced boxes, Goff’s clients received something that reflected their individuality as much as his. And where many architects develop a signature style, Goff saw each project as a chance to think architecture anew. And if some of Goff’s solutions were too new for their time, his work still stands as a symbol of just how radical architecture can be.
© Guardian News & Media 2020