Goff, Revisited
2024Arts/Institutional (Completed)
Three drawings looking at the social and cultural histories layered in the esoteric material choices of Bruce Goff’s Ford House, Bavinger House, and Shin’enKan. They include the vast range of post industrial, military, and pop culture references that weave across Goff’s work.
These drawings were made for the exhibition Cover Me Softly, the 2024 iteration of the Beta Biennial in Timișoara, Romania. They dig deeper into the legacy of the architect Bruce Goff, about whom the Art Institute of Chicago is organizing a major survey exhibition that opens in December, 2025 titled Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, which we have designed. The exhibition gave us an excuse to explore Goff’s incredible output which we represented through these interpretive drawings.
A student of Frank Lloyd Wright, Goff’s expressive designs were particularly daring and expressive. Theorist Charles Jencks called him “the Michelangelo of Kitsch,” and critic Ada Louise Huxtable described a man “whose tastes run to peacock feathers and pink plastic.” Openly gay, Goff’s architecture was hyperbolic–constructed with war industry excesses and dollar store trinkets.
Goff drew from his cultural environment—from interwar pop to technological industrialism and rampant consumerism—and wove them into fantastic assemblies and forms. His buildings seem to reach into the depths of Americana in material specifications, structural logics, and spatial organizations. At the same time, his process was deeply intuitive: he was a dedicated teacher, prolific painter, and music enthusiast.
Our drawings reveal the material and social histories of three of his iconic houses: the Ford House (Aurora, IL, 1949–50), Shin’en Kan (Bartlesville, OK, 1956), and the Bavinger House (Norman, OK, 1955). They include references to industrial reuse and the quotidian products he transformed into architectural surfaces, and they reveal the networked and relational wires of invisible information that were deeply important to his practice.
Project team: Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, Ekin Bilal, Ruby Kang
With the additional support of: MIT Fay Chandler Creativity Grant, MIT HASS Award.
Exhibit
2024 Timisoara Architecture Biennial, Cover Me Softly
