Bruce Goff: Material Worlds

“I’ve been controversial ever since I started. I can’t help it. I’m neither ashamed nor proud of it. That’s just what happened.”

—Bruce Goff, 1979/80

This major retrospective celebrates the unbounded creative practice of American architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982).

Best known for his groundbreaking, idiosyncratic single-family homes in suburban and rural areas across the United States, Goff charted an alternative narrative for a modern architecture imbued with individuality, materiality, and fantastical invention.

Dubbed the “Michelangelo of kitsch” by architecture critic Charles Jencks, Goff rejected the minimalist aesthetics and the metropolitan worldview of his modernist contemporaries. Instead, his work was inspired by everyday consumer goods and building practices from small towns and cities in the Midwest and the Great Plains where he grew up, trained, taught, and based his practice.

In this environment, Goff found fertile ground for an expanded range of architectural forms and materials. His homes featured domes, spirals, and tetrahedrons and a wide variety of materials including natural elements such as coal and goose feathers and manufactured products like astroturf, cellophane, glass cullet, and sequins. Importantly, this decisive break with convention was built on learnings from his lifelong mentor Frank Lloyd Wright.

The first major show of the architect’s work in over 30 years, this exhibition is drawn primarily from the Art Institute’s vast Bruce Goff collection and archive. The project features over 200 works including spellbinding architectural drawings, elaborate architectural models, and a selection of Goff’s ambitious, little-known abstract paintings.

The exhibition also mines Goff’s diverse collections, including seashells and crystals, popular magazines, clothing, and Japanese and Chinese embroidery. These personal objects illuminate his unusually broad range of influences encompassing Native American art, queer modernisms, science fiction, and East and Southeast Asian art and music.

Finally, the installation brings to life the architect’s intense engagement with music through a customized player piano featuring his own musical compositions. These works are featured in a contextual exhibition design by New York-based architecture firm New Affiliates, led by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb.

Together, the project showcases the radical independence of Goff’s vision. His provocative structures—with their expansive approach to materials, diverse cultural influences, and sensitivity to the regional landscape—remain unprecedented within 20th-century American architecture.

Bruce Goff: Material Worlds is curated by Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator, Architecture and Design, and Craig Lee, assistant curator, Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.