A Stranger Things-like mood opens Britni Harris's documentary "Goff", on today at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: NY) at New York's Cinépolis Chelsea.
American architect Bruce Goff can be heard in the background as we are shown images of the Tulsa Club, the soul of Tulsa past, present and future, abandoned since 1994.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," Goff states. "It is the basis of all art and science. We often think of infinity as something way out there somewhere in outer space, but we also know that infinity is within. We have never reached infinity within or without. But we keep exploring, we keep wanting to know and I think the more we explore, the more we find out, the more mysterious all of this becomes."
The non-conformist architect tried to go beyond infinity throughout his career, exploring the possibilities of architecture from an unconventional point of view, using common materials in innovative ways and coming up with futuristic combinations of colours and textures.
Born in Alton, Kansas in 1904, Goff moved as a young child with his family to what would become Tulsa, Oklahoma. He displayed a great talent for drawing since he was a young child and his father apprenticed him at age twelve to the Tulsa architectural firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush.
His early drawings for houses and small commercial projects were inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, but soon Goff left him behind and found his own voice and style. In 1926 he designed Tulsa's Boston Avenue Methodist Church (his high-school art teacher Adah Robinson, often co-credited as one of the designers, was actually the creative force behind it and was a strong influence on Goff). This unusual building characterised by a circular shape and a skyscraper-like tower, was followed by the Tulsa Club, a local historic landmark, in 1927.
Harris briefly lingers on Goff's experience in the Naval Construction Branch of the U.S. Navy where the architect completed more or less conventional yet distinctive assignments with the limited materials available during the war.
Discharged from the army, he took a teaching position with the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, becoming also chairman of the institution. The documentary mainly focuses on this incredibly productive and inspiring period in the life of Goff.
Influenced by art, music, painting and sculpture, Goff encouraged creativity among his students: in his opinion architecture was one of the arts and had various analogies with music. Architecture, like music, had to be free from constraints and limitations, that's why he would often invite students to listen to his large collection of records (Goff went on to compose and record his own music and, to pay tribute to him, musicians Mark Kukendall and Sam Regan composted an original soundtrack for this documentary recording all the music live within the spaces he created).
Students felt incredibly inspired by him and often stated he would teach enlightment, enrichment and the uniqueness of the individual rather than just architecture.
While teaching, Goff also developed projects for private clients, among them Ledbetter House (1947) in Norman, Oklahoma, Bachman House (1948), in Chicago, Illinois, and Bavinger House (1950; demolished in 2016), in Norman, Oklahoma.
Goff’s willingness to explore unprecedented forms, his passion for new materials, shapes and solutions, meant that his work wasn't often received in a favourable light from more conservative environments.
Ledbetter House was for example characterised by a free enclosure, stone walls, a suspended roof and a series of angled planes; Bavinger House, designed for the artist couple Eugene and Nancy Bavinger and made with the help of his students, looked extremely exotic for those years. The building was inspired by Antoni Gaudi, Balinese music, Claude Debussy, Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and seashells.
Bavinger House had the shape of a spiral that, coiling around a steel pole, extended vertically, while the roof was anchored by cables to the pole. The exterior of the building seemed to extend into the interior creating a new kind of landscape with exciting textures and shapes, and the building also featured rough stones and coloured glass walls and interior gardens and ponds.
The documentary director also examines the projects that were never built, in particular a studio for Joe Price (son of Harold, a famous collector of Edo-period Japanese art), a futuristic construction made interlocking irregular trapezoids, that Frank Lloyd Wright disapproved of, and the extraordinary Crystal Chapel, a construction of interlocking glass pyramids.
Something dramatically changed in the life of the architect in 1955: Goff, who was gay, was accused of "endangering the morals of a minor", and he was pushed to leave the university. After resigning, he moved his studio to the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which had been designed by his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright.
He kept on working, designing Shin'enKan, a space for his patron Joe Price, characterised by a hexagonal pit on the ground floor, a ceiling appliquéd with goose feathers and several triangular shapes that called to mind Star Trek's starship Enterprise (Goff was a fan of the series) and the Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (housing Joe Price's collection). Later on in his life Goff was eventually invited to come back to teach at Oklahoma University and he enthusiastically returned.
Goff died in 1982 and his triangular tombstone featuring his name in the font he used for his sketches and incorporating a piece of glass from the ruins of Joe Price's Shin'enKan, was designed by one of his students.
The buildings and the drawings shown in this documentary, that features archive footage, interviews with his devoted secretary at Oklahoma University, friends and former students, prove that Goff never liked static architecture. He favoured indeed unusual construction methods, eclectic materials and forms, overlapping lines, ornamental ironic and disruptive elements (also known as "Goffitecture" to his fans), and always created buildings respecting the personality of his clients, tailoring his architectures on their needs and preferences.
One of the interviewees explains that writing an essay about him and describing his work would be as impossible as describing Nijinsky dancing in "Shéhérazade", that's why he never found a place in the canon of architectural history.
Yet Goff probably didn't even want to be part of the architectural history: while there are around 80 buildings designed by him still standing (sadly Shin'enKan burnt down in a 1996, probably torched by the developer who had bought the land around it; while the Bavinger House was razed by the son of its original owners), Goff's legacy is not in those extraordinary constructions. His greatest legacy is indeed in the lessons that, 37 years after his death, he is still teaching us – take risks, embrace failure and, above all, never accept the ordinary, only the extraordinary.
"Goff" by Britni Harris is on today at the Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York, as part of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF). The event is also followed by a Q&A with the director. The documentary will be screened again on 19th and 20th October 2019.