Bruce Goff: Architecture of Discipline in Freedom by Arn Henderson

Description

The most original American architect you’ve never heard of — praised by Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Wright called Bruce Goff one of the few truly creative architects in America, and Arn Henderson’s comprehensive monograph shows why. Apprenticed at twelve to a Tulsa firm and made a partner at twenty-six, Goff (1904–1982) built a career on a single conviction: that architecture should never repeat itself.

From the Art Deco landmark of Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church to the spiral, canvas-roofed Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma — honored with the American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-five Year Award — Goff’s buildings are like nothing else on earth: playful, strange, and utterly personal. Henderson traces the life behind them with scholarly care and evident love.

A revelation for architecture lovers tired of the same modernist canon. Discover the wildest talent American architecture produced.

Few American architects were as wildly original as Bruce Goff. Bruce Goff: Architecture of Discipline in Freedom, by architectural historian Arn Henderson, is a comprehensive monograph on a designer Frank Lloyd Wright himself called one of the few truly creative architects in America.

Apprenticed at twelve to the Tulsa firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush and made a partner at twenty-six, Goff (1904–1982) built a career on the conviction that architecture should never repeat itself. From the Art Deco landmark of Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church to the spiral, canvas-roofed Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma — which earned the American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-five Year Award — his portfolio of 500 projects fused organic principles with influences as varied as Gaudí, Debussy, and Japanese prints. Henderson, who documented Goff’s Oklahoma works for the National Park Service, traces the architect’s journey from Tulsa prodigy to chairman of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Architecture and his later years working from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower.

Inside the study:

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• The full arc of Goff’s career, from age-twelve apprentice to modernist maverick
• Landmark works: Boston Avenue Church, the Bavinger House, and beyond
• Goff’s influential years teaching and chairing the University of Oklahoma’s School of Architecture
• The philosophy of ‘discipline in freedom’ — rigor in service of imagination

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For readers of architectural history and American modernism, Henderson’s study is the essential guide to an architect who refused to build the same building twice.