You call them the Goff Balls or members of the American School. Whatever they were, the half dozen or so architects who were educated by Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma and then made their way to California to bring their masters swerves and verve to meet the Pacific crashing into the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s did some weird buildings.
The designs of five of them (the missing figure, strangely, is the most famous, Bart Prince), from their student fantasies to built projects that ranged from houses of the wealthy to low-income housing, and from banks to bridges, is the subject of a finely curated exhibition at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center. Though the show closes soon (January 27, 2025), an equally smart book of the same title, Outré West, collects some of the most striking images this quintet produced.
Curated by Stephanie Pilat, Angela Person, and Marco Piscitelli, the exhibition and the book both proceed alphabetically through the list, but that sequence also goes from the least strange to the weirdest architecture. Within each monographic section, you also encounter a student who was encouraged to invent, instead of copy.
They had to do so in a manner that stretched the very limits not only of buildability, but of gravity and common sense, then confront the fact that they have to work in a larger context. For each of them, that meant calming down their designs, but it seems as if the California landscapes (especially along the coast), free culture of the 1960s, and the economic boom of the time gave them some latitude to bring their training to bear on what counted then and there as the real world.
Violetta Autumn, who leads off both the book and the exhibition, had the strangest life. Born in Eastern Europe, she grew up in Peru before making her way to Oklahoma at a time when women architecture students were rare. She moved to the Bay Area, worked for several architects, and then started her own practice. However, she was also an artist, and activist and a politician, and as a result there is only one work that fully represents her design: her own house in Sausalito. It is an exercise in hexagonal geometries carried out in wood and stone that is as Frank Lloyd Wrightian as it is Goffian –as is much of the work here.
If Autumn was sparse in her production, John Marsh Davis was prolific. He produced houses that grew grander with each new client (a recent monograph shows these buildings in all their glory), but also more conservative. Composed of strong, often Japanese-influenced roofs, pergolas, and open spaces framed by exposed timber frames, they do not appear to show much of his education by Goff. Rather, they continue the assimilation of Asian influences by the American mode of stick building in a manner that California architects from the Greene brothers, Bernard Maybeck, and Julia Morgan had pursued. It was the woodsy ramble of modernism that the so-called Bay Area School of modernism perfected in the 1950s and 1960s. Davis pushed this work towards an almost fetishistic attention to detail and a proliferation of the above forementioned elements so that the houses appear as open cages spreading under tall and multi-layered roofs.
Arthur Dyson, who is still practicing in Fresno, was the one Oklahoma graduate who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright after his time in Norman, but his early work, especially the Lencioni Residence of 1986, is a curvaceous undulation of a home that is as sexy as anything Goff built. Over time, Dyson produced many commercial and residential projects that smoothed the curves into straighter forms, though at times, as in the Woods Residence of 1996, those more normative geometries fall apart into a pile of tilted blocks barely cohering into single structure.
If Dyson’s and Davis’s work was constrained and shaped by their clientele, Donald McDonald’s was even more so, but that was because he chose to experiment with building methods and planning that he hoped would benefit those who could not afford private homes. Early on, he produced, like many others in the 1960s, mass production proposals, hoping to bring not only the logic, but also a bit of the aesthetic of the car industry into the profession.
Although these projects were not built, his firm did spend decades designing housing projects largely targeted at what counts as the lower end of the economic spectrum in the strange world of California residential architecture. He then veered off into infrastructure design, first in the renovations of and additions to the approaches to the Golden Gate bridge, and then as the lead designer of the bridge erected to replace the east span of the Bay Bridge after its collapse in 1989. If Goff influenced his work, it appears it was through the spirit of experimentation rather than in a formal sense.
Mickey Muennig, finally, is the one architect in this presentation whose work looks like it brings Goff’s sensibility to California. It is as curvy and eclectic in its forms as anything Price designed, but almost all of it is a fever (or, probably acid) dream of the American Shingle Style. Located in and around Big Sur, it consists of shingled, arching, and teepee-like wood constructions that reach up into the trees and out to views towards the Pacific Ocean. Some of Muennig’s other designs, including his own house of 1980-1994, dug, Hobbit-like, into the ground, becoming a modern version of a sodbuster’s house where Barbarella might feel at home.
Muennig’s work is not only the most identifiable of that of the five, but also the most well-known. That is not just because of its expressive nature, but also because he designed most of the tree houses, modern caves, and luxury glamping structures that make up the Post Ranch Inn, the expensive resort in Big Sur that lets those who can afford it become one with nature while enjoying both all modern conveniences and Muennig’s frames, curves, and expansive spaces.
So, what happened when these Okies made it to the Promised Land? Like their forerunners who ran away from the Dust Bowl to become farmers, clerks, and movie stars in California, melting into the general population along the way, the Goff Balls might have brought a sense that experimentation and expressive form were central to architecture with them. But it seems the landscape, both humanmade and natural, won out.
The work in Outré is as much a delightful riff on the image of a near-Edenic land the State has often thought itself to be, as it reflects the supposed freedom Goff felt he had found away from foreign and East Coast influences in Oklahoma. In California, these five architects took that liberty to reinterpret where they were, and designed responses that were, at their best, clearer in their articulation of the possibilities they were offered than that of their colleagues.
Pilat and Person have worked hard to establish an archive of the work of Goff’s students, starting out with their school projects and moving on to the designs they produced over their lifetimes as architects. Concentrating on those who went to California (other than Price) in this exhibition gave them a chance to show architecture at the edge of the discipline as well as the continent. I await future treatments of how what they call the American School inserted itself into and brought a little weirdness to designs in the rest of the country.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Biopartners 5 |Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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