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.”
Goff was particularly disdainful of the popular International Style emerging in America during the post-war years of the late 1940s and 1950s. In his view, those expressions were derivative of a continuum of limiting and rigid design principles. Goff was critical of an architecture that relied solely on the expression of a glass wall with an exposed structural grid to sustain visual interest. A glass box, Goff believed, offered only a cold image of anonymity. They were the same everywhere, with little relationship to specific places. And they were invariably devoid of any emotional content and diversity of expression that might give rise to an association with a particular environment or feelings of aspiration.
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The ambiguity of design was an ever-present issue for the students. They were well aware of Goff’s familiar adage: “You can do anything you want to do as long as it is good. There is no right solution.” They had the freedom to choose, but how did they know what to choose? Goff, and other faculty, urged students to follow their own instincts through trusting their intuition. One’s initial ideas were usually the best because they were uniquely one’s own. As an extension of Wright’s belief in the “democracy” of architecture, Goff insisted that students had “the right to have their own ideas.”
Yet, they were also encouraged to be curious and keep an open mind in conceptualization. They should not be afraid to try other things. There was no form, color, or texture that should be taboo. But as the seed of an idea developed, recognizing and understanding the order within that idea was imperative. The only way one could achieve originality, and the potential for richness and variety of expression, was by a critical understanding: achieving order in a design was dependent upon the discipline of rejection of all that was not true to the idea. It was through a process of discovery that one arrived at an honest expression. This was the meaning of Goff ’s oft-used statement of design as “discipline in freedom.” Ultimately, creativity would only be achieved through intuition, rational thought and the discarding of ideas that did not sustain the order of the initial concept.