Jan. 31, 2026 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
Toward the end of his career in the late 1970s, the architect Bruce Goff lived with his mother and a tuxedo-hued cat named Chiaroscuro in the small city of Tyler, Texas. He stopped work promptly at 4:30 p.m. each day to watch Star Trek. His favorite meal was roast beef and potatoes. Over the preceding four decades he had moved his peripatetic practice all over the nation, mostly keeping to small cities and towns of the Great Plains, never interested in paying the toll of cultural supplication on either coast.
Goff designed houses at every price point: mostly for artists, bankers and farmers but also for an Oklahoma oil dynasty. He designed a church made from pipeline components, and oilfield roughneck congregants built it. He loved stuff. He entered his professional prime just as World War II wound down, but the epochal machine of industrial production made to win it kept spinning, flooding the US with a factory-stamped cornucopia of consumer goods. They all found their way into Goff’s work: AstroTurf, sequins, plastic coasters, turkey inseminators (one client was a turkey farmer). He made chandeliers of out of cake pans and used pink fiberglass insulation as a decorative element.
“He was not what you would call a sophisticated architect,” says David De Long, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school, who organized Goff’s archive before its move in 1990 from Columbia University to the Art Institute of Chicago. “He was very suspicious of those who appeared more intellectual than creative.”
Following from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Goff pursued an Americanist strain of design, seeking to define a new culture through explosions of form and color across the plains and prairie. Writing in the the New York Times in 1970, architecture critic Ada Louis Huxtable described Goff as “a phenomena, part of an indigenous American tradition of the unspoiled, romantic, land-loving loner.”
Unlike Wright, Goff’s buildings did not seek to emulate or dissolve into their native landscapes. They were instead hyperbolic exaggerations of their context. The cairn-like fieldstone chimneys at his Glen Harder House in Minnesota make this farmstead appear to be an ancient site for pagan rituals where pilgrims bring their finest hot dish. The Bavinger House in Oklahoma was filled with water gardens and grottos, a network of shallow pools and dense plantings that look like a stage play set starring mermaids, all unspooling from a sandstone tower dissipating in a spiral pattern inspired by seashells.
Goff returned to beloved material tropes again and again, embedding shimmering recycled glass into pitch-black anthracite coal walls. Shag carpet is once again hanging like wallpaper at the architect’s behest, this time along the gallery walls of the Art Institute of Chicago, as part of “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” organized by Art Institute curators Alison Fisher and Craig Lee. Through photos, drawings and models, the exhibit showcases buildings that were both inventive yet homespun, futuristic and rustic, encompassing both The Jetsons and The Flintstones. The first major retrospective on Goff in 30 years, “Material Worlds” summons his spiritual and often literal home of Route 66, through projects that embody the same sense of American spectacle and consumerist plenty as its roadside attractions.
“Material Worlds” masterfully highlights the wild range of Goff’s creative pursuit beyond his architecture, with a special focus on his formidable paintings, which Goff regarded as a little more than a productive and creative distraction. Bolo ties, miniature disco balls and his collection of brightly patterned polyester shirts — often paired with a fur jacket — personalize the show, adding intimacy for an architect whose work was itself deeply personal. “We all like looking in people’s closets,” say Fisher. Goff was content to sort through the whirlwind of consumerist fantasia, pick out the things he and his clients loved, and mold them into temples of self-expression that were somehow also coherent design compositions.
Born in 1904 in Alton, Kansas, Goff was an obvious design prodigy, moving from apprentice at age 12 at the Tulsa, Oklahoma, firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush to partner by 26, without so much as a college degree. He designed his first building at 15, and could expertly emulate Prairie Style and Art Deco architecture by his early 20s. His Boston Avenue Church in Tulsa was a soaring and delicate Art Deco tower, and his first major project; it began construction in 1927, when Goff was 23 years old.
His unbuilt design for the 1922 Baughman Bungalow in Tulsa saw Goff synthesizing Art Deco with Prairie architecture, as well as subtle Chinese and Asian elements, demonstrating an incredible aptitude to absorb and deploy different stylistic motifs. For an intensely provincial designer, Goff was attracted to alternative design and art traditions both near and far, including Native American and Japanese art.
Goff was married to dancer Evelyn Hall from 1928 to 1932; after his Tulsa firm went bust during the Great Depression, Goff moved to Chicago in 1934. The six years he spent in the Windy City receive a special focus in “Material Worlds.” He decorated the Chicago apartment he shared with Richard San Jule, his lover, with gold lame curtains, strands of beads, and a big metal gong, creating what Yale University’s Scott Herring describes in the catalog as a “queer sanctum.”
This was the first time Goff had lived near a coherent gay subculture, centered on Chicago’s Near North Side, and proximity to a community formed and forced outside the American mainstream pushed him to pursue his own idiosyncratic vision of design. Before Chicago, Goff proved himself to be a masterful mimic, working through established styles. After Chicago — he took a job teaching at the University of Oklahoma in 1942 — a building by Goff could never be mistaken for the work of another architect. Nearly two decades after his death in 1982, his remains were moved to Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery and buried under a cullet-glass adorned grave marker.
The exhibition design by New York design firm New Affiliates plays it straight amid Goff’s down-market glam, with black and white gallery walls accented by pops of orange-pink neon. It presents Goff’s painting on equal footing with his architecture, and seams between walls are painted with these color accents that cast neon hues around corners.
Goff saw himself as a modern architect, but his conception of modernism was very much outside the International Style embodied by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Goff was far more of a populist, aligning modern design with the postwar culture of consumer goods — which is much closer to how most Americans experienced modernity.
Goff excelled at exceedingly American building types: crystalline teepee-shaped Rocky Mountain motor lodges, a Vegas hotel as a monumental circus tent. For the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, he envisioned a pile of mega-scaled horseshoes embracing courtyards and auditoriums. As a proudly eccentric, middlebrow designer for middlebrow clients, he had no need for the theoretical contortions that shaped the discourse. Goff’s buildings look like nothing else, but there is no self-conscious reach toward an avant-garde. Mies famously said you couldn’t create a new architecture every Monday morning, but Goff vowed to create one for each new building. “He certainly didn’t imagine himself as a kind of paragon of a certain type of design,” says Fisher.
Goff can also be a viewed as a precursor to Postmodernism, an architectural style that emerged in the late 20th century that was defined by ironically quoting and borrowing from disparate historical styles of design. There is a similar sense of assembly and oddball juxtaposition in Goff’s work, but there’s not an ounce of cynicism nor any whispers of the inside jokes that animated Postmodernism.
De Long brought Goff to Columbia University to lecture on his work, and the architect showed a photo of his 1958 Durst House in Houston. With its comically oversized circular porthole windows, oblong shape, and tall glass pavilion on one end, it looks a bit like a tugboat drawn by a loopy kindergartener. He wasn’t taken particularly seriously at the Ivies, and Goff didn’t take himself too seriously either. The audience started laughing, “and Goff laughed right along with them,” says De Long.
Architecture critic Charles Jencks called Goff the “Michelangelo of kitsch,” and this was largely understood as a dig. But in today’s golden age of cynicism, when even the tiniest consumerist impulse is scrutinized for its moral character, simply loving small, silly things doesn’t seem so bad. “It’s just kind of in the zeitgeist,” says Fisher. “We need a little more pleasure. We need spaces that feel exciting and accessible, and I think these things were really high priorities for Goff.”
In 1955, Goff was arrested in a homophobic sting operation, which led to his exit from the University of Oklahoma architecture school. The aura of queerness surrounding Goff’s life and work can be reductively obvious — he bejeweled T-squares he drew with and cardboard tubes used to transport the drawings — but also more densely layered. Given his sexuality, Goff’s use of consumer goods as building materials and architectural decoration bears more than a passing resemblance to the artistry of drag performance, filled with improvisation, borrowing, exaggeration and misappropriation.
Goff had many friends but few disciples. Because so much of his work is in private hands and doesn’t fit neatly into codified design traditions, many projects, including his Bavinger House, have been destroyed or demolished. He’s a one-off, less known than he should be, without posthumous institutional heft to preserve his built legacy.
His status as a queer man largely living outside of cosmopolitan urban centers as well as his idiosyncratic vision of architecture that could border on psychedelia makes him look countercultural in some lights. But the absence of a broad societal agenda deflates this reading, says Fisher. “He wanted to live in a rich, ornate universe, he wanted to dress the way he wanted, and he wanted people to be able to live in spaces that felt more attuned to what they loved,” she says.
Goff seemed to love America with the fervor of a wistful outcast. Through all his personal and professional dislocations, the whirl of hyperbolic form and Americana bric-a-brac he summoned with each building seem like jubilant knocks to be let back in.