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Vol. 30:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 2002
The Bruce Goff Archive in the Department of Architecture, The Art Institute of Chicago
by Annemarie van Roessel, in collaboration with Christa Aube
American architect Bruce Goff (1904-1982) was arguably one of the most inventive and iconoclastic architects of the 20th century. Born in Kansas and largely self-taught, he spent most of his life in independent practice in Oklahoma, Chicago, and Texas. In addition to his pursuit of "design for the continuous present" through architecture, Goff was also an accomplished abstract artist and, in the 1930s, a composer of avant-garde piano compositions.
Bruce Goff with his cat, Chiaroscuro, in his studio in Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1962. Photograph courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1990 The Art Institute of Chicago received Goff's comprehensive personal and professional archive through Joe D. Price, a friend and client of Goff and executor of his estate.1 At the Art Institute --one of the largest repositories of architectural archives in the United States-- this collection greatly complements the archives of such other distinguished Midwestern architects as Louis Sullivan, Daniel H. Burnham, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Bertrand Goldberg.
During a professional career that spanned more than 60 years, Goff saw nearly 150 of his more than 500 architectural designs built in 15 states. Among the best known are the Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Ruth Ford House in Aurora, Illinois; the Gene and Nancy Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma; the Shin'enKan estate in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (destroyed by arson in 1996); and the Shin'enKan Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Known for using such mundane materials as discarded glass cullet, raw coal, Quonset hut ribs, nautical rope, dime-store ashtrays, and goose feathers in radical ways, his reputation as an anti-academic architect was as far-reaching as his influence. In each of his designs, Goff's sensitivity to client, site, space, and material set him far outside the mainstream.
Apart from his innate creativity, Goff found inspiration for his work from a variety of sources, including the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaud&#iacute;, and Erich Mendelsohn; modern European fine arts and music; and the arts of Japan and Southeast Asia. He also made a profound impression on a younger generation of architects through his role as dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma from 1947 to 1955 and through lecture tours and his apprentice program.
Today, as during his lifetime, Goff is regarded as one of the masters of organic architecture. Based on no historical precedent and incorporating his almost fanatical devotion to uninhibited imagination, his designs were unlike any other; his most notable extant building, the Bavinger House, is frequently cited as one of the most important examples of postwar American residential architecture. Goff's work appears frequently in exhibitions and publications in the United States and abroad.
Perspective rendering of the Glen and Luetta Harder House, Mountain Lake, Minnesota, 1970. Rendered by Bart Prince. Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Because of the vast scope of the Bruce Goff Archive, the Art Institute divided the contents according to material type between four departments in the museum. The Department of Architecture holds Goff's original architectural records and compositions; the Ryerson and Burnham Archives hold his books, personal and professional papers, photographs, audio and visual recordings, and ephemera; the Department of Asian Art holds a large collection of his Japanese prints; a portion of his Native American art collection was transferred to the Department of African and Amerindian Art; and a drawing by Gustav Klimt, owned by Goff, is held in the Department of Prints and Drawings.2
In 1999 the Art Institute received a significant grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, with additional support from several private donors, for an 18-month project to process the Bruce Goff architectural records held in the Department of Architecture. Numbering approximately 8,000 items, these documents include design sketches, presentation renderings, working drawings, and copy prints. Herculean preliminary work in arranging and describing the Bruce Goff Archive was completed by the noted Goff scholar David De Long prior to the archive's arrival at the Art Institute. De Long's catalog raisonn&#eacute; numbers were used as a permanent complement to the Department of Architecture's finding aid.3
However, prior to the grant, the collection remained largely inaccessible due to incomplete processing and its problematic physical condition. The objectives of the grant were to process and rehouse the entire collection, to stabilize and conserve the records as needed, to photograph the most frequently requested records for improved research and exhibition access, and finally, to make the finding aid available to the public via the Art Institute's web site.
The Department of Architecture's collection documents the span of Goff's life, from early childhood sketches of fantasy structures to drawings that document the complex design processes he undertook as a professional architect. All told, these records illustrate an astonishing eight decades of creativity through a typical variety of architectural drawings: design sketches; presentation drawings and renderings; working, shop, structural, and site survey drawings; and designs for furniture, murals, and other decorative elements.
The scope of these records also provides an excellent source for study of the techniques used to create architectural drawings during the 20th century. Goff used such varied media as graphite pencil, colored pencil, colored inks and markers, watercolor, and gouache on varied supports, including drafting linen, tracing paper, opaque paper, and illustration board. Copy prints were made by various reprographic techniques, including blueprint, sepia, and diazo processes, and were often further enhanced with colored pencils, gouaches, or colored markers.
Numerous architectural records had suffered damage due to excessive use, intrinsically poor materials, and less-than-ideal storage conditions prior to their arrival at the Art Institute. This was manifested in tears, creases, losses, stains, moisture damage, and adhesions of many types of pressure-sensitive tapes. Through the NHPRC grant, the archivist systematically stabilized and rehoused unmatted drawings in archival map folders and in rolled tubes, as appropriate. A significant number of frequently requested drawings were matted and mounted to allow more frequent use; many of these smaller drawings were then rehoused in archival boxes. Items with the most severe problems were treated by the museum's paper conservators, with excellent results. These 8,000 records are now housed in 70 flat-file drawers, 10 archival boxes, and additional rolled storage cases, all contained in a climate-controlled vault.
Due to the uniqueness of each record and the specificity required by researchers, the collection was arranged and described on an item level, with drawings grouped by project and identified by client, location, date, De Long catalog raisonn&#eacute; number, drawing type, media, support, size, condition, and location. Through this intensive processing, and with the help of additional research in the Ryerson and Burnham Archives' holdings of Goff's professional papers, many records that were previously unidentified or misidentified finally received correct attributions.
In addition, these architectural records document the work of Goff's students, apprentices, and employees, a diverse group of talented renderers, delineators, draftsmen, and designers in their own right. For the first time, as well, comprehensive identification of these contributors was possible, and additional biographical information was obtained from those still living through the assistance of the Friends of Kebyar, a national organization devoted to the study of organic architecture.
Finally, as a complement to the preservation and cataloguing work undertaken by the Art Institute, several hundred architectural drawings and archival documents have been reproduced in photographic and digital formats by its Department of Imaging, so that high-quality images are available for research and publication by scholars and for display on the museum's web site.
The Art Institute also created a web page that provides an overview of the Bruce Goff Archive, selected images from the collection, and downloadable versions of the finding aids compiled by the Department of Architecture and the Ryerson and Burnham Archives.4 As the other departments of the museum complete the cataloguing of their portions of the Bruce Goff Archive, this page is expected to include their finding aids and additional images.
The Bruce Goff Archive now has the distinction of being one of the most frequently consulted collections in the Department of Architecture for research and publication by scholars, students, architects, curators, and property owners. In particular, the number of inquiries about this material has significantly increased since 1995, when the Art Institute organized a retrospective exhibition on Goff's work, The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904- 1982: Design for the Continuous Present.5 Additionally, as many of Goff's extant buildings are reaching the 50-year age requirement for consideration as historic landmarks, we anticipate that the archive will find increased use from property owners and preservationists.
The sheer magnitude of the materials that physically comprise the archive is staggering. From the initial gift of 8,000 individual architectural drawings-not to mention the 130 linear feet of material in the Ryerson and Burnham Archives-the collection continues to grow through donations and purchases. Together, these objects illustrate Goff's vast accomplishments as an architect, artist, composer, educator, and dreamer. As an essential complement to his extant buildings, the Bruce Goff Archive provides invaluable insight into his ideas, his inspirations, his colleagues, and his architectural designs. The Art Institute of Chicago is deeply committed to the preservation and access of the archive, and considers it to be one of the great legacies of American architecture.
Annemarie van Roessel is Bruce Goff Archivist in the Department of Architecture and Christa Aube is an Archives Assistant in the Ryerson and Burnham Archives, both at The Art Institute of Chicago. An earlier version of this article was published in Friends of Kebyar Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 2001).
Notes:
- Copyright in Bruce Goff's own works was also transferred to the Art Institute, with the deed of gift to the physical collection.
- Other portions of Goff's estate, primarily phonograph records, clothing, and household effects, remain in the possession of Goff's executor, Joe D. Price.
- For a comprehensive description of David De Long's work with Bruce Goff and the preservation of his archive, see his article "The Historian's View," American Archivist 59 (Spring 1996): 156-164. De Long published this catalog raisonn&#eacute; in his book Bruce Goff: Toward Absolute Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
- http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/goff/rbgoff.html
- See Saliga, Pauline and Mary Woolever, eds. The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904-1982: Design for the Continuous Present (Chicago: Prestel Verlag/The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995).
