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,...