This story originally appeared in the November 15, 2011 edition of This Land.
An important, yet often overlooked, dimension of Bruce Goff’s contribution to American architecture was his years teaching at the University of Oklahoma. Although he never attended a university, Goff was invited to join the faculty in January 1947 and was appointed Chairman of the School of Architecture in May 1948. He was a brilliant teacher and leader. He had notable accomplishments with 30 years of experience in architecture. And he had clear ideas about the process of design, with his view that teaching was not just a job but almost a religion.
The developing philosophy of the school reflected Goff’s philosophy of architecture. It was a program based on freedom of self-expression with a pedagogical premise that all individuals had a potential for creativity. The goal of the school was to create a nurturing environment that might help students discover their own potential. Goff wrote to a prospective applicant, “in developing our student’s creative ability, we try to give them the necessary means to express themselves (technically)... and, to help them find their own aesthetic direction.” Goff believed that most schools of architecture—though they had discarded the historicism of Beaux-Arts education—were engaged in a “new eclecticism” that allowed them to indiscriminately appropriate ideas from contemporary masters like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. It became, in many schools, “...the fashion to clan together into one of these three camps, each feeling the other is insane or unclean,” Goff wrote.
Such education, Goff believed, could only lead to lifeless imitation with little understanding of underlying principles. For Goff, it was critical to distinguish between inspiration, influence, and imitation. Great works of the past, as well as nature, might inspire or influence a design, but the principles must be understood and assimilated to produce an authentic work that was not an imitation of what another had done. Goff said, “...we are not interested in producing disciples of any man but rather in developing individuals with sound principles.”