A house by the architect Bruce Goff was not for the faint of heart. In 1949, in Aurora, Illinois, for instance, Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford—a civil engineer and an artist—commissioned a Goff home whose central structure would eventually resemble a pumpkin. Deciding they’d had enough criticism from neighbors, the Fords put up a sign at the construction site that read, We Don’t Like Your House Either.
Today, plenty of people love Goff and his houses for the way they burst out of modernism’s stern functionality. Working mostly from the 1940s to the 1980s, largely in the Midwest, Goff produced hundreds of designs for homes and public buildings, with around 150 of them built. The more than 200 works in “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds”—an exhibition opening today at the Art Institute of Chicago—include architectural drawings and models, slideshows of the finished buildings, and examples of Goff’s abstract, rather mystical watercolors. For personal style, there are pieces of his own furniture, objects, and clothing. The fact that this is Goff’s first major show in more than 30 years suggests that his position as an architectural superstar remains a work in progress.
