Last fall when Alicia, Zack and I started planning The Pickup’s editorial calendar for 2026, we realized that two of our ambitions came together neatly, in a way we hadn’t expected. First, we wanted to cover the resurgence of national interest in the late architect Bruce Goff, and his joyful, flamboyantly designed buildings that still dot Oklahoma’s landscape. And second, we wanted to see what would happen when we dedicated an entire week’s worth of stories to a single topic. Thus, Goff Week was born.
When his parents brought him here as a child, Tulsa was still Indian Territory. The family moved around, living in Skiatook and Hominy. “Here the child for the first time saw Cherokees whirling as they danced their tribal dances,” wrote one Goff biographer. As a teenager he apprenticed for a Tulsa architecture firm and ultimately designed several of our most iconic Art Deco buildings, like Riverside Studio (also known as the Tulsa Spotlight Theater) and the Tulsa Club. He was prolific, and his style was singular, embracing the subversive in an age of uniformity. “I knew of Goff in my architectural beginnings as a shadowy mystical figure in Oklahoma who made bizarre buildings,” the decorated postmodern architect Frank Gehry once wrote. “He was an American. Like [Frank Lloyd] Wright, he was the model iconoclast, the paradigm of America. How should we have him now—this messy creature from Middle America?”
Goff eventually took lead of the architecture school at the University of Oklahoma, where he was pressured to resign amid a McCarthy-era smear campaign. And despite that ugly setback his influence extended well beyond the borders of Oklahoma, cropping up across the rural American midwest and in dense urban settings alike. Look closely at photos of the Glen Harder house in rural Minnesota (now demolished) and the Pavilion for Japanese Art in Los Angeles, for instance, and you’ll notice they share an exuberant curvature to their rooftops. That influence continues today, and critics like The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman are taking new notice of Goff’s iconoclastic legacy.
This week we’ll bring you stories about Goff’s work from Tulsa’s past, but also its present. We’ll learn what makes a Goff a Goff, but we’ll also meet the local artists drawing on his legacy for inspiration. Finally, if you happen to be a Pickup reader in the upper midwest, you should go see the Goff exhibit that Rob Rook was game to review for us at Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a screening of Britni Harris’ Goff documentary at the UIC School of Architecture. The latter includes a panel moderated by our pal and Tulsan Karl Jones. Speak of the devil, Karl and his crew at Goff Fest deserve a lot of credit for reinvigorating local interest in the big guy’s work these last few years. If you ever find yourself in a deficit of delight or wonder, you can address it by using their map to take yourself on a self-guided tour of Goff houses in Tulsa.
