Bruce Goff’s legacy lives on at LACMA and through renegade architects

The one and only pre-millennium building that LACMA director Michael Govan elected to save as part of his campus revamp was the museum’s Japanese Pavilion, designed by the brilliant, undeniably quirky architect Bruce Goff. The edifice is like nothing else near it, or in all of L.A.: a series of rough stone towers and fiberglass shoji screen-covered vessels arranged around a grand internal space, connected by a spiraling ramp and filled with hovering, petal-like overlooks. All are supported by steel cables and tusk-like beams, referencing everything from Japanese armor to the mastodons in the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits.

While mostly unknown to the general public, Goff, who died in 1982, was celebrated in the architecture world for his vision, talent and utterly unique voice. His lasting influence — particularly as an educator — has been on display in “Do Not Try to Remember: The American School of Architecture in the Bay Area,” an exhibit at the American Institute of Architects San Francisco’s Center for Architecture + Design ending Friday, with a closing reception to take place Aug. 14.

“What makes Goff so fascinating and relevant is his fearless attitude toward ingenuity and his ambivalence toward highbrow aesthetics and taste,” says Marco Piscitelli, curator of the exhibit. “Much of what he was doing was downright shocking to a mainstream audience.”

A precocious draftsman, Goff began working at a Tulsa, Okla., architecture firm at age 12 and by 22 had designed what is still one of Tulsa’s great monuments: the bursting-with-wild-detail Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. Honing his technical skills with the Navy’s Seabees during World War II, he would create otherworldly buildings across the Midwest. Among them: Shin’en Kan, the Bartlesville, Okla., home of oil heir Joe Price, clad in Kentucky coal and highlighted with “starburst” glass tube windows; the onion-shaped, red steel tube-affixed Ford House in Aurora, Ill.; and the Bavinger House in Norman, Okla., a spiraling mound of sandstone anchored around a central mast and employing, among many other materials, oil field drill stems, recycled glass cullet and steel aircraft struts.

Goff designed the Bavinger House, which was constructed with University of Oklahoma students from 1950 to 1955 while he was chair of the architecture school.

(Robert A. Bowlby Collection, American School Archive, University of Oklahoma Libraries)

In part thanks to a recommendation by Frank Lloyd Wright, his long-distance mentor of sorts, Goff served as the chair of the school of architecture at the University of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1955. While there, Goff would instill a radical spirit of freedom, self-expression and reverence for natural and cultural context that broke profoundly with the day’s conventional education. Dominated by Modernists like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that convention focused on industrial materials, clean lines and a singular approach.

“There is still mythology around what Goff was able to achieve: This school in the middle of the country becomes this hotbed, sort of overnight, of this revolutionary, bizarre, shocking work,” notes Piscitelli.

Goff’s leadership of what would eventually become known as the American School — a term Donald MacDonald, one of Goff’s OU students, coined — helped spawn some of the most radical architecture that our country has ever seen. Creative students came to OU from around the world. While many stayed, a major contingent wound up migrating to California, a more free-thinking place with the forgiving climate, dramatic landscapes, willing clients and booming economy to help turn their Oklahoma dreams into reality.

This westward migration is the subject of the exhibition at AIA San Francisco’s Center for Architecture + Design. The exhibition’s name points to Goff’s only strict rule — carried out with the help of a faculty that included the uber-talented architect Herb Greene and Mendel Glickman, Wright’s longtime structural engineer — that while students should be aware of the past, they must not copy it or be limited by it. Goff instead encouraged students to draw inspiration from the geology and culture of locations, from their own fantasies and from sources as wide as music and mythology.

The show is a smaller, scrappier counterpoint to an exhibition —and accompanying catalog — staged last fall at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City. That show was called called “Outré West,” its name alluding to the unconventional approach of these West Coast transplants. Piscitelli created it with Angela Pherson and Stephanie Pilat.

Piscitelli both curated and designed the exhibition in San Francisco, whose reproduced images are not set in precious frames, like fine art, but printed on recyclable cardboard panels resting on Home Depot galvanized studs. “We leaned into their mass-reproduced nature,” explains Piscitelli, who also wanted to capture the feeling of discovering these pieces in archives. “They’re not art objects — they’re fragments of practice: drawings, site photos, construction details, press clippings.”

Goff’s students adapted his radical approach particularly well to Northern California’s dramatic landscapes, ranging from emerald green bluffs and cascading valleys to fog-embraced coastlines. Their names, like his, barely register in today’s consciousness. But they should. Those highlighted in the show include MacDonald, Mickey Muennig, John Marsh Davis and Violeta Autumn, as well as a few architects not displayed at the OU show, like Valentino Agnoli, Robert Overstreet and Robert A. Bowlby.

“Do Not Try to Remember” is organized by themes, not architects. “Building From Site” emphasizes intimate interactions with the area’s landscapes and culture: Muennig’s cliff-hugging, prehistoric-seeming structures, for example, employ natural materials excavated directly from their sites. His two houses for Greek businessman John Psyllos in Big Sur take their cues from the area’s sloped landscapes and natural terraces and even the vernacular architecture of Greece, resulting in spiraling stone landings, curved brick arches and heavily stepped masses. Muennig’s own home, covered in a thick green roof (long before that was a thing), was known to be inhabited by frogs, gophers and lizards — merging in every way with the land.

Mickey Muennig designed the Pavey House in Big Sur, integrating it with its natural surroundings.

(Courtesy of the Mickey Muennig Collection, American School Archive, University of Oklahoma Libraries)

Violeta Autumn’s vertiginous redwood-and-concrete house perched along a cliff in Sausalito — a site others deemed unbuildable — demonstrates how terrain could inspire formal innovation. John Marsh Davis took this further in his Barbour House in Marin County’s Kentfield, creating a structure that spans lengthwise, like a bridge, in order to fully open — via massive glass and wood sliders — to its lush garden, blurring any distinction between inside and out.

Violeta Autumn designed this redwood-and-concrete house in Sausalito, depicted in an undated photo. Others had deemed the site unbuildable.

(Outre West)

“Structural Expression,” meanwhile, showcases how these architects elevated natural structural elements like beams, vaults and joinery into art. “They saw structure as a poetic element,” Piscitelli explains. “Not concealed, but celebrated.”

Davis took this approach in the three-story atrium of his Calle del Sierra Residence in Stinson Beach, which is visually connected on all levels, showcasing exposed timber trusses and open lofts reachable via intricate ladders. Agnoli, who worked as a carpenter prior to entering architecture, used long spans of wood to create massive trusses and spiraling nautilus shapesand formed brick into catenary arches.

John Marsh Davis designed the Barbour Residence in Kentfield, completing it in 1965. The structure blurs any distinction between inside and out.

(Bruce Damonte Photography)

Sensitive urbanism, too — as opposed to the scorched-earth urban renewal of many Modernists — was a central preoccupation, and in a section called “Architecture for All,” the show includes lesser-known projects that tackled themes of density and equity decades before these entered the architectural mainstream. Donald MacDonald’s Two Worlds housing project in Mountain View creates a layered, mixed-use “village” filled with irregular plazas and mature foliage. “That project could be built today and still feel ahead of its time,” Piscitelli says.

While much of this work may look wild or undisciplined — it certainly did to adherents of the International Style — it in fact required extraordinary craft and skill. The show emphasizes these architects’ commitment to working collaboratively with contractors, builders, fabricators and structural engineers. “It’s not just these solitary geniuses, right? They really were working in communities of artisans and clients,” says Piscitelli. For the Aug. 14 closing reception, AIA San Francisco will convene several of these surviving contributors, including Jim Lino and Frank Pinney, the builders of many of Davis’ and Muennig’s projects.

Such efforts help shed light on a visionary movement that has been severely underappreciated due to, among other things, its intentionally out-of-the-mainstream nature and its practitioners’ distance — both literally and figuratively — to power. Goff may have led the way in Oklahoma, but Gropius led Harvard, Mies van der Rohe led IIT and the list goes on.

As the show points out, these designers were regularly dismissed as “outlaws,” “iconoclasts” and “renegades,” all terms they would come to embrace. Designer and critic Charles Jencks is quoted, from his story in Architectural Design magazine: “Goff is so extreme that he makes the rest of the Avant-Garde look like a bunch of prep school conformists wearing the same school tie.”

Goff, who was gay, did not conform to prevailing views about sexuality, either, and left OU in 1955 under what some historians consider to be duress. He began his work on LACMA’s Japanese Pavilion in 1978 but did not live long enough to see it built.

There has been a recent uptick in interest in Goff and the American School, including a recent film about Goff called simply “Goff,” one about Herb Green (“Remembering the Future With Herb Green”) and a major 2020 exhibition at OU called “Renegades,” whose attendance was badly limited by the pandemic. A new book, “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds,” is set to come out at the end of this year in conjunction with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. All reveal not just a mind-boggling collection of talent but how relevant the work is today, when our built world feels so predictable, artificial and wasteful.

“These architects were having really prescient conversations really early, at a time when architecture at the midcentury was still obsessed with replicating forms in a mass-produced context,” Piscitelli says.

We have much more to learn, he adds. “It’s almost like we’re still trying to find a language to describe these architects because they were in some ways so divorced from the mainstream.”