Renowned today as one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, Bruce Goff (1904–1982) was only twelve years old when a Tulsa architectural firm took him on as an apprentice. Throughout his career he defied expectations, not only as a designer of innovative buildings but also as a gifted educator and painter. This beautifully illustrated volume, featuring more than 150 photographs, architectural drawings, and color plates, explores the vast multitude of ideas and themes that influenced Goff’s work. Tracing what he calls Goff’s “path of originality,” Arn Henderson begins by describing two of Goff’s earliest and most significant influences: the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the French composer Claude Debussy. As Henderson explains, Goff embraced from a young age Wright’s ideal of organic expression, where all elements of a building’s design are integrated into a unified whole. Although Goff’s stylistic dependence on Wright eventually waned, the music of Debussy, with its qualities of mystery and “discipline in freedom,” was a perpetual source of inspiration. Henderson also emphasizes Goff’s identification with the American West, particularly Oklahoma, where he developed most of his ideas and created many of his masterful buildings. Goff served as a professor at the University of Oklahoma between 1947 and 1955, becoming the first chair of its School of Architecture. The new studio course he introduced was a pivotal development, ensuring that his ideas were imparted to the next generation of architects. Part biography of a well-known architect, part analysis of Goff’s work, this book is also a finely woven tapestry of information and interpretation that encompasses the ideas and experiences that shaped Goff’s artistic vision over his lifetime. Based on scores of interviews with Goff’s associates and former students, as well as the author’s firsthand study of Goff’s extant buildings, this volume deepens our appreciation of the great architect’s lasting legacy.

Like America itself, the architecture of the United States is an amalgam, an imitation or an importation of foreign forms adapted to the natural or engineered landscape of the New World. So can there be an "American School" of architecture? The most legitimate claim to the title emerged in the 1950s and 1960s at the Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, where, under the leadership of Bruce Goff, Herb Greene, Mendel Glickman, and others, an authentically American approach to design found its purest expression, teachable in its coherence and logic. Followers of this first truly American school eschewed the forms most in fashion in American architectural education at the time—those such as the French Beaux Arts or German Bauhaus Schools—in favor of the vernacular and the organic. The result was a style distinctly experimental, resourceful, and contextual—challenging not only established architectural norms in form and function but also traditional approaches to instructing and inspiring young architects. Edited by Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat, and Angela Person, this volume explores the fraught history of this distinctively American movement born on the Oklahoma prairie. Renegades features essays by leading scholars and includes a wide range of images, including rare, never-before-published sketches and models. Together these essays and illustrations map the contours of an American architecture that combines this country’s landscape and technology through experimentation and invention, assembling the diversity of the United States into structures of true beauty. Renegades for the first time fully captures the essence and conveys the importance of the American School of architecture.

Generously illustrated with concept development sketches as well as site plans, section drawings, full schematics, and photographs of finished buildings, this engaging volume focuses on "organic synthesis," the creative process that is architect Gunnar Birkerts's methodology and philosophy. Birkerts likens his organic approach to listening to music: the music must be heard as it unfolds; an attempt to perceive it all at once would reduce it to noise. Organic synthesis occurs as all aspects of a project present themselves: the building site, the building program and budget, available materials and technologies, emotional or intuitive content revealed through architect-client interaction.

Honored with the 1990 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, Fay Jones is an Arkansas original. In receiving the medal from Prince Charles of Great Britain, Jones was hailed as a “powerful and special genius who embodies nearly all the qualities we admire in an architect” and as an artist who used his vision to craft “mysterious and magical places” not only in Arkansas but all over the world. This book accompanied a special museum exhibit of Jones’s life and work at the Old State House in Little Rock. It traces Jones’s development from his early years as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, to the culmination of his ability in such arresting structures as Pinecote Pavilion in Picayune, Mississippi; Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Chapman University Chapel in Orange, California. Through the black-and-white photographs of the homes, chapels, and other buildings that Jones has created and the accompanying captions and interviews of the architect, the reader is allowed a view into this man’s remarkable talent. Designing structures that fuse architecture and landscape, the organic and the man-made, Jones has created special places which touch their viewers with the power and subtlety of poetry. Herein we learn why. From the Foreword by Robert Adams Ivy Jr.: “Fay Jones’s architecture begins in order and ends in mystery. . . . His role can perhaps best be understood as mediator, a human consciousness that has arisen from the Arkansas soil and scoured the cosmos, then spoken through the voices of stone and wood, steel and glass. Art, philosophy, craft, and human aspiration coalesce in his masterworks, transformed from acts of will into harmonies: Jones lets space sing.”

The retro-futuristic epoch is one of the most visually spectacular in architecture's history. The utopian buildings of the 1960s and 1970s never go out of style. This book compiles radical ideas and visionary structures. The notion of utopia proves as diverse as it does universal. From exuberant master plans to singular architectural expressions, the rise of the utopian architectural movement in the 1960s and 1970s represents a critical shift in ideology away from mid-century traditionalism. This period shakes off the conformity and conventions of the 1950s in favor of a more experimental post-war agenda. Marked by groundbreaking reinterpretations of both the single family house as well as more large scale developments, the embrace of utopian and generally progressive thinking mirrored the cultural revolution of the times. These daring, charming, futuristic, and hopeful designs were not isolated to a particular part of the world. Visionary voices longing for a fresh approach to architecture began appearing across France, Japan, the United States, and beyond. The Tale of Tomorrow documents this prolific era in architecture--a time when anything felt possible as architects began to think further and further outside the box. The Tale of Tomorrow focuses exclusively on built manifestations of utopian ideas. Rather than mixing together abstract theorists with practitioners, this book focuses on the tangible embodiments of such forward thinking. Highlighting well-known projects as well as the more obscure and offbeat, the collection of utopian approaches compiled here maintain their visual power and infectious optimism nearly half a century later. These experimental structures, both large and small, appear in everyday places in stark contrast to their far-from-utopian contexts. In addition to featuring a range of whimsical architectural gestures, The Tale of Tomorrow also explores more brutalist styles of utopian thinking. This bold and iconic class of projects not only inspires a sense of awe and reverence towards one's surroundings but also demonstrates the broad spectrum of deeply personal solutions at play as each architect began to craft their ideal world. Whether an organically shaped residence or a towering sculptural complex, the projects in this book stand as poignant suggestions of what might have been and, perhaps what could still be.

In this tantalizing work, Roger Connah explores the peculiar odyssey of twentieth-century architecture through the buildings and writings of Finlands iconoclastic architect, Reima Pietila. Among architects, Pietila is a cult figure, a respected but often misunderstood outsider and "arctic shaman," only recently granted the international acclaim and appreciation that are his due. Pietila's complex, geomorphic structures have been compared to the work of Gaudi and Bruce Goff and variously labeled surrealistic, romantic, or expressionistic. Writing Architecture positions Pietila at the heart of contemporary architectural debates - the carnival of conflicting isms, modern post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive. From his relative isolation in Helsinki, he is thrust into the community of this century's most revolutionary artists and thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Einstein, Beckett, Borges, Magritte, and McLuhan. Through Pietila Connah reflects on architecture's progress and excess in this century, tracing a path through multiple meanings and intellectual adventures. More metaphysical inquiry than conventional monograph, this extraordinary study draws from various sources to "read" architecture as Pietila does, as a form of cultural composition in which all theory, literature, music, art, or natural phenomena are potential sources for architectural meaning. Like the existential detective in the pulp crime novels on Fantomas, the elegant French philosopher-thief, Connah offers fragmentary clues, contradictory solutions, and digressive speculations on the particular mystery, misery, and miracle that is modern architecture, but wisely leaves the final verdict up to his discerning readers. Roger Connah's extensive collaboration with Reima Pietila has provided him with a unique opportunity to trace the architect's inimitable approach to architecture and culture. Since 1986 the author has been living in India working as a freelance writer; he is visiting Professor at The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and The Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.