The one and only pre-millennium building that LACMA director Michael Govan elected to save as part of his campus revamp was the museum\u2019s Japanese Pavilion, designed by the brilliant, undeniably quirky architect Bruce Goff. The edifice is like nothing else near it, or in all of L.A.: a series of rough stone towers and fiberglass shoji screen-covered vessels arranged around a grand internal space, connected by a spiraling ramp and filled with hovering, petal-like overlooks. All are supported by steel cables and tusk-like beams, referencing everything from Japanese armor to the mastodons in the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits.<\/p>\n
For the record:<\/p>\n
8:57 a.m. Aug. 8, 2025The name of the documentary \u201cRemembering the Future With Herb Greene\u201d was incorrect in an earlier version of this story. <\/p>\n
While mostly unknown to the general public, Goff, who died in 1982, was celebrated in the architecture world for his vision, talent and utterly unique voice. His lasting influence \u2014 particularly as an educator \u2014 has been on display in \u201cDo Not Try to Remember: The American School of Architecture in the Bay Area,\u201d an exhibit at the American Institute of Architects San Francisco\u2019s Center for Architecture + Design ending Friday, with a closing reception to take place Aug. 14.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat makes Goff so fascinating and relevant is his fearless attitude toward ingenuity and his ambivalence toward highbrow aesthetics and taste,\u201d says Marco Piscitelli, curator of the exhibit. \u201cMuch of what he was doing was downright shocking to a mainstream audience.\u201d <\/p>\n
A precocious draftsman, Goff began working at a Tulsa, Okla., architecture firm at age 12 and by 22 had designed what is still one of Tulsa\u2019s great monuments: the bursting-with-wild-detail Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. Honing his technical skills with the Navy\u2019s Seabees during World War II, he would create otherworldly buildings across the Midwest. Among them: Shin\u2019en Kan, the Bartlesville, Okla., home of oil heir Joe Price, clad in Kentucky coal and highlighted with \u201cstarburst\u201d glass tube windows; the onion-shaped, red steel tube-affixed Ford House in Aurora, Ill.; and the Bavinger House in Norman, Okla., a spiraling mound of sandstone anchored around a central mast and employing, among many other materials, oil field drill stems, recycled glass cullet and steel aircraft struts.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Goff designed the Bavinger House, which was constructed with University of Oklahoma students from 1950 to 1955 while he was chair of the architecture school.<\/p>\n
(Robert A. Bowlby Collection, American School Archive, University of Oklahoma Libraries)<\/p>\n
In part thanks to a recommendation by Frank Lloyd Wright, his long-distance mentor of sorts, Goff served as the chair of the school of architecture at the University of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1955. While there, Goff would instill a radical spirit of freedom, self-expression and reverence for natural and cultural context that broke profoundly with the day\u2019s conventional education. Dominated by Modernists like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that convention focused on industrial materials, clean lines and a singular approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is still mythology around what Goff was able to achieve: This school in the middle of the country becomes this hotbed, sort of overnight, of this revolutionary, bizarre, shocking work,\u201d notes Piscitelli. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Goff and Julia Urrutia admire an abstract design model at the University of Oklahoma in 1955. Goff led a movement that came to be known as the American School.<\/p>\n
(Courtesy of the Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society)<\/p>\n
Goff\u2019s leadership of what would eventually become known as the American School \u2014 a term Donald MacDonald, one of Goff\u2019s OU students, coined \u2014 helped spawn some of the most radical architecture that our country has ever seen. Creative students came to OU from around the world. While many stayed, a major contingent wound up migrating to California, a more free-thinking place with the forgiving climate, dramatic landscapes, willing clients and booming economy to help turn their Oklahoma dreams into reality.<\/p>\n
This westward migration is the subject of the exhibition at AIA San Francisco\u2019s Center for Architecture + Design. The exhibition\u2019s name points to Goff\u2019s only strict rule \u2014 carried out with the help of a faculty that included the uber-talented architect Herb Greene and Mendel Glickman, Wright\u2019s longtime structural engineer \u2014 that while students should be aware of the past, they must not copy it or be limited by it. Goff instead encouraged students to draw inspiration from the geology and culture of locations, from their own fantasies and from sources as wide as music and mythology.<\/p>\n
The show is a smaller, scrappier counterpoint to an exhibition \u2014and accompanying catalog \u2014 staged last fall at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City. That show was called called \u201cOutr\u00e9 West,\u201d its name alluding to the unconventional approach of these West Coast transplants. Piscitelli created it with Angela Pherson and Stephanie Pilat.<\/p>\n
Piscitelli both curated and designed the exhibition in San Francisco, whose reproduced images are not set in precious frames, like fine art, but printed on recyclable cardboard panels resting on Home Depot galvanized studs. \u201cWe leaned into their mass-reproduced nature,\u201d explains Piscitelli, who also wanted to capture the feeling of discovering these pieces in archives. \u201cThey\u2019re not art objects \u2014 they\u2019re fragments of practice: drawings, site photos, construction details, press clippings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goff\u2019s students adapted his radical approach particularly well to Northern California\u2019s dramatic landscapes, ranging from emerald green bluffs and cascading valleys to fog-embraced coastlines. Their names, like his, barely register in today\u2019s consciousness. But they should. Those highlighted in the show include MacDonald, Mickey Muennig, John Marsh Davis and Violeta Autumn, as well as a few architects not displayed at the OU show, like Valentino Agnoli, Robert Overstreet and Robert A. Bowlby.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo Not Try to Remember\u201d is organized by themes, not architects. \u201cBuilding From Site\u201d emphasizes intimate interactions with the area\u2019s landscapes and culture: Muennig\u2019s cliff-hugging, prehistoric-seeming structures, for example, employ natural materials excavated directly from their sites. His two houses for Greek businessman John Psyllos in Big Sur take their cues from the area\u2019s sloped landscapes and natural terraces and even the vernacular architecture of Greece, resulting in spiraling stone landings, curved brick arches and heavily stepped masses. Muennig\u2019s own home, covered in a thick green roof (long before that was a thing), was known to be inhabited by frogs, gophers and lizards \u2014 merging in every way with the land. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mickey Muennig designed the Pavey House in Big Sur, integrating it with its natural surroundings. <\/p>\n
(Courtesy of the Mickey Muennig Collection, American School Archive, University of Oklahoma Libraries)<\/p>\n
Violeta Autumn\u2019s vertiginous redwood-and-concrete house perched along a cliff in Sausalito \u2014 a site others deemed unbuildable \u2014 demonstrates how terrain could inspire formal innovation. John Marsh Davis took this further in his Barbour House in Marin County\u2019s Kentfield, creating a structure that spans lengthwise, like a bridge, in order to fully open \u2014 via massive glass and wood sliders \u2014 to its lush garden, blurring any distinction between inside and out.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Violeta Autumn designed this redwood-and-concrete house in Sausalito, depicted in an undated photo. Others had deemed the site unbuildable.<\/p>\n
(Outre West)<\/p>\n
\u201cStructural Expression,\u201d meanwhile, showcases how these architects elevated natural structural elements like beams, vaults and joinery into art. \u201cThey saw structure as a poetic element,\u201d Piscitelli explains. \u201cNot concealed, but celebrated.\u201d <\/p>\n
Davis took this approach in the three-story atrium of his Calle del Sierra Residence in Stinson Beach, which is visually connected on all levels, showcasing exposed timber trusses and open lofts reachable via intricate ladders. Agnoli, who worked as a carpenter prior to entering architecture, used long spans of wood to create massive trusses and spiraling nautilus shapesand formed brick into catenary arches.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
John Marsh Davis designed the Barbour Residence in Kentfield, completing it in 1965. The structure blurs any distinction between inside and out.<\/p>\n
(Bruce Damonte Photography)<\/p>\n
Sensitive urbanism, too \u2014 as opposed to the scorched-earth urban renewal of many Modernists \u2014 was a central preoccupation, and in a section called \u201cArchitecture for All,\u201d the show includes lesser-known projects that tackled themes of density and equity decades before these entered the architectural mainstream. Donald MacDonald\u2019s Two Worlds housing project in Mountain View creates a layered, mixed-use \u201cvillage\u201d filled with irregular plazas and mature foliage. \u201cThat project could be built today and still feel ahead of its time,\u201d Piscitelli says.<\/p>\n
While much of this work may look wild or undisciplined \u2014 it certainly did to adherents of the International Style \u2014 it in fact required extraordinary craft and skill. The show emphasizes these architects\u2019 commitment to working collaboratively with contractors, builders, fabricators and structural engineers. \u201cIt\u2019s not just these solitary geniuses, right? They really were working in communities of artisans and clients,\u201d says Piscitelli. For the Aug. 14 closing reception, AIA San Francisco will convene several of these surviving contributors, including Jim Lino and Frank Pinney, the builders of many of Davis\u2019 and Muennig\u2019s projects.<\/p>\n
Such efforts help shed light on a visionary movement that has been severely underappreciated due to, among other things, its intentionally out-of-the-mainstream nature and its practitioners\u2019 distance \u2014 both literally and figuratively \u2014 to power. Goff may have led the way in Oklahoma, but Gropius led Harvard, Mies van der Rohe led IIT and the list goes on.<\/p>\n
As the show points out, these designers were regularly dismissed as \u201coutlaws,\u201d \u201ciconoclasts\u201d and \u201crenegades,\u201d all terms they would come to embrace. Designer and critic Charles Jencks is quoted, from his story in Architectural Design magazine: \u201cGoff is so extreme that he makes the rest of the Avant-Garde look like a bunch of prep school conformists wearing the same school tie.\u201d <\/p>\n
Goff, who was gay, did not conform to prevailing views about sexuality, either, and left OU in 1955 under what some historians consider to be duress. He began his work on LACMA\u2019s Japanese Pavilion in 1978 but did not live long enough to see it built. <\/p>\n
There has been a recent uptick in interest in Goff and the American School, including a recent film about Goff called simply \u201cGoff,\u201d<\/a> one about Herb Greene (\u201cRemembering the Future With Herb Greene,\u201d now in postproduction<\/a>) and a major 2020 exhibition at OU called \u201cRenegades,\u201d whose attendance was badly limited by the pandemic. A new book, \u201cBruce Goff: Material Worlds,\u201d is set to come out at the end of this year in conjunction with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago<\/a>. All reveal not just a mind-boggling collection of talent but how relevant the work is today, when our built world feels so predictable, artificial and wasteful.<\/p>\n \u201cThese architects were having really prescient conversations really early, at a time when architecture at the midcentury was still obsessed with replicating forms in a mass-produced context,\u201d Piscitelli says.<\/p>\n We have much more to learn, he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like we\u2019re still trying to find a language to describe these architects because they were in some ways so divorced from the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The one and only pre-millennium building that LACMA director Michael Govan elected to save as part of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[51583,51585,230,228,226,227,3805,51581,51587,229,51589,88,6463,51586,51582,51584,51591,51590,51588,23640],"class_list":["post-71826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-american-school","tag-architects-san-francisco","tag-architecture","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-bay-area","tag-bruce-goff","tag-creative-student","tag-design","tag-dramatic-landscape","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibition","tag-few-architect","tag-marco-piscitelli","tag-mickey-muennig","tag-name-point","tag-okla","tag-ou","tag-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}