Bruce Goff: Material Worlds

This major retrospective celebrates the unbounded creative practice of American architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982). Best known for his groundbreaking, idiosyncratic single-family homes in suburban and rural areas across the United States, Goff charted an alternative narrative for a modern architecture imbued with individuality, materiality, and fantastical invention.

Dubbed the “Michelangelo of kitsch” by architecture critic Charles Jencks, Goff rejected the minimalist aesthetics and the metropolitan worldview of his modernist contemporaries. Instead, his work was inspired by everyday consumer goods and building practices from small towns and cities in the Midwest and the Great Plains, where he grew up, trained, taught, and based his practice.

The first major show of the architect’s work in over thirty years, this exhibition is drawn primarily from the Art Institute’s vast Bruce Goff collection and archive. The project features over two hundred works, including spellbinding architectural drawings, elaborate architectural models, and a selection of Goff’s ambitious, little-known abstract paintings.

Curated by Alison Fisher, Harold and Margot Schiff Curator, Architecture and Design, and Craig Lee, assistant curator, Architecture and Design, The Art Institute of Chicago.