-By Tim Murphy

Bruce Goff built few large buildings, focusing on smaller residential commissions and teaching. Yet he was the most democratic of architects because he actually believed that architecture was a combination of the individual architect's expression and the individual client's needs. Because his forms were so original, he was also one of the country's most misunderstood architects. While his use of materials and soaring designs were unusual—even brazen—they were not employed at the cost of the client's needs or program. Indeed, his clients came to love their houses because he listened so carefully to their aspirations. Their appreciation for the artistic aspect of his solution grew out of his appreciation for the practical. His genius was a result of connecting the individual reality to the transcendent.

Goff spent much of his career in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, places often associated with a conservative ethos. While that culture may have cost him his job at the University of Oklahoma in the mid-1950s, it was also a fertile ground for him to practice because nobody told him what he could or could not design. And his students were reverential. In the wide open plain he taught them to listen to music, art, and finally, their own voice.

Rand Elliott and Contract invited me to host a conversation between people who could share personal stories about the man and his work. More than a quarter-century after his death, he is still inspiring us.

Our roundtable consisted of Jerri Hodges Bonebrake, Goff's former secretary at the University of Oklahoma; Arn Henderson, a retired architecture professor, who is writing a major book on Goff; Bart Prince, an internationally renowned architect who worked with Goff for many years; our guest editor Rand Elliott; and Contract editor in chief Jennifer Thiele Busch. The focus of the discussion was on Goff as a teacher, a person, and an architect working with clients.

TM: We know the outline of your various associations with Goff. But tell us how you came to work with him?

JHB: I met Mr. Goff when I was 18 and on my first job interview. He conducted an unorthodox interview. His desk was covered with books. Immediately, he started showing me the works of Corbu, Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Mies van der Rohe.

Finally I said, "Well, you know, sir, I don't really know what architecture is." He laughed, and said, "Well, neither do a lot of people." He didn't ask very many questions, but he did ask if I could take shorthand. I wrote some shorthand symbols down, and he looked at them strangely and turned the paper around, up and down, back and forth, and then he handed it back to me and said, "I don't understand that either, but I could if I wanted to." Later, I realized that he didn't really care whether I could take shorthand or not, he was simply making a point.

AH: I studied architecture at OU from 1956 to 1961 and came under the sway of Goff through both Jack Golden and Herb Greene. I also taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1968 to 2002. I've been working on a book on Bruce Goff for a long time.

BP: I became aware of his work while I was at Arizona State University. He came to give a talk in 1968. I went to work for him that summer, and returned when I finished school and worked with him in Kansas City and Tyler, Texas. After I started my own practice, we associated on several things.

TM: What was he like as a teacher? Can you comment on his teaching style?

AH: The foundation that he used was the notion that everyone had creative potential, and that everyone had a right to his own ideas. That was sort of the bedrock platform that Goff used as his pedagogy. That is what accounts for the incredible array of diversity one would see in his student projects. He dovetailed intimately with Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas; a democratic architecture as a symbol of a democratic society, and that meant freedom, the freedom to have your own ideas.

JHB: He wanted the students at school to know what was going on in other universities. And so we had traveling exhibits that came in from many universities around the country. And, of course, we had one that went out. I kidded Goff one day: "You know, when our exhibit comes back it is always followed by a string of transfer students."

We had a recorded concert every Friday night. Mr. Goff had hundreds and hundreds of records, and he played them extremely loud. I remember that he played a lot of Russian music. If you were an employee of the University of Oklahoma in the '50s, you had to sign a loyalty oath. Anything to do with Russia was taboo. And one Friday evening a policeman came up and asked why so much Russian music was being played.

TM: There's a certain courage, I would think, that would be required to play Russian music in Oklahoma in 1950. Can you talk about his courage as an architect working outside the Modernist mainstream?

BP: I don't know if he ever thought of it as courageous. He was doing what was coming from inside him. I remember people coming to visit and being very surprised to see books on the Bauhaus and on Mies van der Rohe in his library.

People didn't understand his curiosity about all kinds of things. So in his mind, he was really working in his own time, expressing the time that he was living in a way that came from him, and recognizing the importance of other people. He was aware that he was outside the mainstream to some extent, but he was never trying to scare or shock anybody.

JHB: In my hometown of Norman, I thought this work was a sort of far-out thing. I said something to him about that one time. And actually, he said that he thought he was in the perfect place.

He said, "Oklahoma is a young state not blessed or cursed with dusty, outworn traditions or invasions or European styles; it is fertile ground for the development of an indigenous creative architecture truly expressive of the pioneering and democratic spirit of our people." I guess he thought he found a place where he could exercise his imagination.

BP: At different times people asked him, "Why aren't you in Los Angeles?" or "Why aren't you in New York?" And he said, "Well, because I want to do creative work." His work may have been unusual, but people readily accepted it; and they didn't have somebody there to tell them that it wasn't proper.

JHB: I would also like to give credit to Dr. George L. Cross, who was President of the University of Oklahoma and hired Goff. He said, "I assured him that we valued ideas above degrees in building our faculty." So Goff had only a high school education when he came to the University, and nine months later, he was chairman of the School of Architecture.

JTB: Well, wasn't it Frank Lloyd Wright who said it was a good thing [Goff] didn't go to school?

BP: Go to school, and lose Bruce Goff. I think that was Wright's comment.

Goff also recognized the value of an education—what an open, inquiring kind of an education can do for somebody.

TM: He always had a small practice correct?

AH: He had one or two people. When he moved to Bartlesville, he had both his living quarters and his office combined in Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower.

TM: Do you think the interest in working at home was because of the size of his office, or his interest in being so intimately connected to his work?

BP: I think it was the intimate connection. He told me once that he could work anywhere. "I could sit down in the middle of a shopping mall if I had a little card table and some paper," he said. And it's true. He was using his mind. Tools and the rest of it was just a means to help him explain something to someone else. I saw him sitting at a table with typing paper. If he ran out of space, he just taped another piece onto it.

TM: What was his process like?

BP: It was mostly mental. Initially, he spent a lot of time thinking about things. And he never started working until he really had an idea.

AH: I think that's an important distinction from other architects. Many architects do a great deal of sketching, searching for ideas. With Goff, it was thought-built.

BP: But once he started, it exploded fairly quickly onto the page.

TM: How did he communicate his ideas to his clients or translate that process to clients?

BP: The initial drawing was fairly thorough and complete at a small scale. I sat with him through many presentations to clients, and it was a lengthy process. He wanted the client to experience the process as he had.

When the client would come in, there might just be a glass table with some sheets face down. He would sit there and talk to them for quite a while, and then eventually, he would start to turn over the sheets one by one. And he didn't like to label them. He didn't want the client to be able to run ahead of his explanations. He would make them follow his hand.

He explained it in the same order that his process went creating it. By the time they got to the end—sometimes a couple of hours later—he'd show them an elevation or a perspective. He never showed them that until after they had gone from the inside and seen how it was developed. And in the rare situation where there was a model, he would bring that out.

JTB: And what would the reaction be?

BP: It was always delight and surprise. Every little thing they ever mentioned in their discussions was in there.

TM: A lot is written about his expression and style. Can you elaborate a little bit on how he focused on the client?

BP: Well, the client was the entire focus. The first time they walked in the door was very informal. He was interested in anything they had to say. If there was something they liked or didn't like, he wanted to know. He wanted to know how they lived. They didn't talk about shapes or forms.

TM: You have someone who was such an iconoclast, but at the same time, he's really listening.

BP: When he started with the client, he wanted to be as blank a slate as possible. He was not waiting for the next client to come in the door so he could spring something on them that he'd been thinking about for a long time. He did not do several schemes; he did one scheme. As the architect, he felt that you had to have confidence.

AH: Goff said many times that the client was the most important determinant of the design—the client and the site. Not only would he spend enormous amounts of time talking with clients to find out what they needed and wanted but also to get some understanding of them psychologically.

TM: Do you think it was hard for him to be viewed as an outsider by the rest of the profession when he was working so hard within the normal structure of the discipline?

AH: No. He liked being in that position, because he felt like it gave him freedom. He wasn't expected to conform. But few people ever suspected that his process was so intimately tied to each individual and each situation. Wright used to say there ought to be as many kinds/types/styles of buildings as there are kinds/types/styles of people, but he never took it quite as literally as Goff did.

A lot of people can misunderstand this and say, "All right, well then, these are the client's ideas; the clients are designing it." And that's not the case at all. The clients didn't have the ability to put into a drawing or into an idea or into a structure what they were thinking. And whatever he showed them, they never expected it. But they also could see that it made sense, and that it solved their problem.

JHB: When we had reunions in 1974—19 years after he left school—and then again in 1983, a year after his death, many of his clients came. They paid their respects to Goff because they had become great friends.

BP: And they all thought they had his best house.

JHB: Which is what you want them to think!

BP: But they really did. Each had his best house, because that's what was done for them.

TM: Would it be fair to say that he was far more interested in celebrating the individual than the style?

BP: Absolutely. Style didn't interest him. In fact, he never used that term at all. Each one became its own style; it was the client. We were in London once, and he was being interviewed, and they asked him: "What style is this house?" And he'd say, "Well, that's the Nichols style," or "the Price style"—whoever the client was. Each building was essentially a portrait of that client done by an artist who was able to bring all these different things together.

TM: It's interesting to think of Goff as maybe an outsider during his lifetime, and now he's being looked at as sort of an insider.

JHB: I was so young when I first discovered Goff so I took a few courses in architecture to be better at my job, and I began to see it so differently. After a while everybody else was the outsider.

RE: My first experience of seeing that work was sort of shocking. It was like the first martini you ever have. It's not quite what you expect, but the more of them you have, the better they taste. My appreciation for Bruce Goff is really about his independence.

Recently, I was in the restored Ledbetter House. We walked in the door, and my wife said, "Gosh, aren't those doors and windows just beautiful?" I smiled, and said, "Do you know what those are?" She replied, "They look like glass blocks." And I said, "Actually, they're ashtrays." And there's just such an imaginative solution—everything had the opportunity to be something special.

BP: It's important to understand, too, that the way he arrived at those things is through the process we've been talking about. He didn't just arbitrarily try and think of some way to use a material in a shocking way. In the Ledbetter House, for example, he had something he wanted to accomplish, and he would think, "Now, how could I do this? I could have some very fine leaded glass made. But that's too expensive." And then he would realize that something he had seen that was used for another purpose would actually work.

RE: That evening that the fireplace was going, and every one of these pieces of glass picked up the sparkle. There was this magical kind of experience —almost as if the room were full of fireflies.