Most kids grow up with affection for building and designing, whether with Legos or Lincoln Logs.

Famed architect Bruce Goff wasn’t any different, except that he opted for a more professional approach.

Goff apprenticed at a Tulsa architecture firm at just 12 years old and was commissioned to design his first project at 15. He was a true prodigy — with no formal education in architecture — who would go on to pioneer a style of design that has influence just now coming to the forefront.

“I don’t feel Goff’s impact was as important to the region as it should have been,” said Mark White, a curator at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art who wrote one of the chapters of the Bruce Goff catalogue. “In some ways, Goff was ahead of his time, and his legacy is still being dealt with in interesting ways. His influence is just now being realized.”

“It’s taken a long time to see the significance of what it was that he was doing.”

“Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind” — which debuts at the museum Saturday — displays what made Goff such an important figure in the world of architecture while exploring what made his mind tick through a series of early sketches and computer-generated, 3-D renderings of buildings that were either destroyed or never constructed.

White said Goff’s work was a natural extension of the Prairie School architecture led by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, an approach in which buildings are designed as a continuation of the landscape that surrounded them.

It was Wright himself that advised Goff to not study architecture at school at the risk of losing what made Goff so special in the first place. Goff obliged, continuing to train through firsthand experience, and indeed, never lost what was so unique about his style.

Not unlike the buildings you might spot in a Dr. Seuss book, Goff’s designs balanced an approach that was equal parts organic and surreal, tracing large, dramatic curves into striking, but well-suited, homes and studios.

“It’s an architecture that looks fairly unusual, even to our eyes, 40 to 50 years [after] some of these buildings were built, but if you spend enough time with it, you realize that it is very similar to forms that exist in nature,” White said.

Goff also was a pioneer of green architecture before the green movement even really existed. Not only did he design buildings that matched their environments, he utilized recycled materials from the surrounding area to bring them to life.

These buildings, entirely unique and innovative, and an undeniable proficiency in the field eventually afforded him the opportunity to teach at the OU School of Architecture in 1947 — despite a lack of formal education himself — and he became the school’s chairman just months later, bringing international attention to OU’s architecture program in that short time.

He left OU after almost a decade and continued with his private practice until his death in 1982.

Of course, if Goff was limited by anything, it was the lack of technology architects have at their disposal today, and in using said technology, some of his designs that would have then been impossible have been brought to life through the computer renderings on display at “Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind.”

“[The exhibit] shows just how far out his imagination could extend,” White said. “His ideas were so innovative and so radical in some senses that the technology of the time couldn’t create what he was envisioning.”

White said it is striking just how captivating his works are, even in the time we live in today where seemingly everything is possible.

“We’ve become so used to experiencing new and unusual spaces in our time period, through various things,” White said. “In the digital age, we are very used to new experiences, but I think his spaces can still surprise us, and many of the renderings show just how novel and interesting his uses of spaces were.”

With world famous structures like The Ledbetter House, 701 W. Brooks St., located just blocks away from campus and The Bavinger House, 730 60th Ave., just miles further, students can see the wonder of Goff’s structures in person. White said he hopes people will realize just how important what Goff did here is, for his sake and ours.

“I hope people realize that this incredibly experimental and innovative architect was largely a product of Oklahoma,” White said. “He trained here, he had an incredibly avant-garde school of architecture here. It has international dimensions in its significance.

“For us to realize that some really exciting and important things have not only been done in Oklahoma but relate to Oklahoma ... that’s important. We tend to not give ourselves a lot of credit for having anything to say on a cultural level, but in fact we have.”

Opening Symposia and Reception

Saturday
» Morning Symposium
10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Catlett Music Center,
Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall

» Afternoon Symposium
2 to 4 p.m.
Catlett Music Center,
Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall

» Opening Reception
7 to 9 p.m.
Sandy Bell Gallery in
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

To register, e-mail Brigid Brink at bbrink@ou.edu call 405-325-0843