An Architect Across the Museum: Bruce Goff at the Art Institute of Chicago

American architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982) is best known for his independent vision, embracing organic forms and unconventional materials in his work. He was prolific, designing over 500 projects with nearly 150 built, many primarily single-family homes located in the greater Midwest. He was an autodidact—beginning as a high school-age apprentice at a local architectural firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma—and he was inspired by the vast amount of art, music, and literature that he consumed and collected over the course of his life. The range and depth of his varied creative influences, anchored by key objects that he owned, are the driving approach for the exhibition “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds” at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This paper unpacks the dynamic interplay between curatorial collections and archives collections, as they are marshalled across departments to mount a major retrospective exhibition. This case study focuses on the 1990 gift from his estate of the Bruce Goff Collection and Archives to the Art Institute, which includes approximately 8,000 architectural drawings and paintings in Architecture and Design and over 200 linear feet in the Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives. “Realia”—personal items that Goff owned like seashells, shirts, and travel souvenirs—forms a novel component that illuminates an embodied approach to a creative life, and speaks to the unique needs of collecting architecture within an art museum in order to display and study it.