Archinect - News

A new gift will keep the legacy of the American School alive at the University of Oklahoma's College of Architecture

2023-02-28T13:53:00-05:00

A new landmark donation to the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma will help preserve the legacy of the American School, one of the most important movements within midcentury modernism, thanks to the generosity of legendary professor Bob Faust’s widow Sherry.

The multimillion gift will go towards maintaining the school’s archive, hiring a curator to oversee the collection and coordinate exhibition programming around it, creating a permanent exhibition space in the lobby of Gould Hall, an annual fellowship, and a four-year funded professorship for special research projects related to design topics.

The college’s Division of Architecture director Stephanie Pilat said the professorship is designed in a “flexible way,” adding it would come with a salary stipend and a budget to pursue projects related to the American School. “It will provide support for that library which supports this important history, and it will provide funding for a curator of ...

Herb Greene’s Prairie House seeks landmark status

2022-04-15T11:49:00-04:00

Those involved with the house and the Prairie House Preservation Society expect it to be a big draw to the area for tourists, artists and the Norman community. Late last year, the Prairie House Trust bought the unusual two-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot home surrounded by open land and turned the management of it over to the nonprofit society.

Greene’s sculptural creation will be turned into a museum under the scheme after being in the hands of private owners for many years. Greene’s longtime colleague at OU, and another pioneer of the highly experimental American School movement, Bruce Goff, is now also being used as a bit of a draw for architecture lovers, with the inaugural Goff Fest festival taking place in Tulsa last November. Those associated with the preservation effort hope the recently renovated house will further add another tourist trap to a state with quite a bit to offer in its growing artistic community.

“I believe that with cultivation and time this can be a real reason that people are going to want to come to Norman,” Norman Arts Council executive director Erinn Gavaghan told the local paper. “It’s incredibly important to the history of architecture at OU. We knew we didn’t want to lose this place.”

Goff Fest kicks off in Tulsa honoring the life of its late architectural native son

2021-11-04T08:58:00-04:00

The living memory of one of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s biggest drivers of the city’s noteworthy contributions to the visual landscape of 20th-century America is getting its due this weekend in an awesome way.

Goff Fest is about to descend on one of the city’s most important historic landmarks. The Tulsa Club Hotel will host the inaugural edition of a four-day festival honoring the life, work, and legacy of its architect, the late Bruce Goff.

Goff was an architectural prodigy who went on to become one of the Midwest’s most prominent practitioners of Modernism. Most of his extant early buildings were realized in the Tulsa metropolitan area, including the Boston Avenue Methodist Church and Riverside Studio, which are both on the National Register of Historic Places.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by GOFF FEST (@goff_fest)

Organized by Tulsa’s Goff Center of the Continuous Present (GCCP), the festival is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based artist Karl Jones. Jones was...

Virtual Architecture Events this week include a lecture, historical tours, film screenings, and a panel on pay equality

2020-05-20T09:12:00-04:00

Featured virtual event happenings today through Friday, from Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, are hosted by UCLA, the Chicago Architecture Center, ADFF, CCA, and RISD.

Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation? Tour? Interview? Happy Hour? Submit it for consideration by clicking here.

Are you an expert in an arena that's especially important right now? Let us know if you would like to work with Archinect to host an online event.

Virtual Lecture with Tei Carpenter
Wednesday, May 20, 2020 | 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM PDT
Join UCLA Architecture and Urban Design for a virtual lecture with Tei Carpenter, Founder of Agency-Agency, Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP. Carpenter’s design and research work has been supported by a number of international organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts and BMW Mini.
Click here to attend and/or register

CAC Live: A Tale of Two Fairs
Wednesday, May 20, 2020 | 7:00 PM – 8:00 P...

Remembering the eccentric and lovable architecture of Bruce Goff

2018-09-13T18:52:00-04:00

Yet now, in our era of elegantly restrained and frequently dour minimalism, when architecture is almost always the province of the rich, it may be that Goff, with his aesthetic idiosyncrasies and affinity for middle-class Midwestern clients (schoolteachers, farmers, salesmen, small-town newspaper publishers), still has lessons to teach us, 36 years after his death.

In her NYT feature, Amanda Fortini revisits the flamboyant and impressive work of the largely forgotten midcentury architect Bruce Goff. "His daring, elaborately imagined homes—he loved unusual shapes and made ample use of found materials—are often dismissed by cultural mandarins as overly futuristic and corny, but they possess a warmth, an earthiness and a wild ingenuity that serve as an antidote to the soberly luxurious, the pared down and the austere," Fortini writes.

John Frank House, Sapulpa, Oklahoma, 1955.

RIP: Bruce Goff's Bavinger House demolished

2016-06-01T13:13:00-04:00

the destruction of the Bavinger House is not surprising. Back in 2011, the home appeared to suffer damage in a storm, and when a crew with News 9 attempted to see the house, they were “greeted with gunfire.” [...] the house remained something of a mystery (it sat on private property, accessed by a rural road) until last July, when PraireMod reported that it had been contacted by Bob Bavinger’s son, Boz, who claimed to be putting the property up for sale for the price of $1.5 million.

Our own Donna Sink reported on the 2011 damage to the house: Goff's Bavinger House collapses. See below for a shot of the demolition scene:

Related on Archinect:

Goff's Bavinger House collapses

2011-06-23T23:15:00-04:00

The architectural oddity either fell to a recent microburst of high winds in Norman, or at the hand of the owner.

Mystery surrounds the current condition of the work of an odd genius.