Goff on Goff: Conversations and Lectures

ISBN-13: 9780806156033 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 352 str.

Philip B. Welch

Opis

Architect Bruce Goff was not afraid to be different. One of the most innovative designers the United States has produced in the twentieth century-a member of a select band that included Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Goff worked), Louis Sullivan, and Mies Van der Rohe-he rode the crest of the architectural wave that swept through the country with the post-World War II technological revolution.In the 1950s, when Goff was head of the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture, Oklahoma emerged as the nation s most daring, avant-garde training ground in the discipline. This book, edited by Philip B. Welch, is compiled from tapes recorded with Goff s permission by Welch, who was one of Goff s students, a longtime friend, and himself a prominent teacher of architecture. Goff on Goff embodies some of the architect s most stimulating lectures and conversations. They have never before been available to readers.Goff s now-legendary teaching method was to throw his students back onto themselves. He stressed honesty: honesty to materials and honesty to the creative impulse, the client, the total environment. An advocate of Gertrude Stein s "continuous present," Goff himself embodied the idea: the torrents of words, ideas, and exhortations that rolled from his tongue held his hearers spellbound.The material reflects the breadth of Goff s mind and interests. A lifelong lover of the music of Debussy, he devotes much of one session to the composer s influence on his architectural work. To paraphrase Goff on music and architecture, ideas, not forms, are the best starting point for structures-and he once designed a house starting with the requirement that it have a revolving door. Goff praises traditional Japanese culture for its homogeneity-and immediately urges his students not to be daunted by the problems of diversity.Recalling the enthusiasm Goff s students felt for the future of architecture, Welch points out that the material is as pertinent today as it was when Goff delivered it."