Lot 345: BRUCE GOFF (1904-1982)

BRUCE GOFF (1904-1982)
A Mahogany Low Table, circa 1954
15½ in. (39.4 cm.) high, 37 in. (81.3 cm.) wide, 42¼ in. (107.3 cm.) deep

ANOTHER PROPERTY

Bruce Goff is widely regarded to be one of America's most important postwar residential architects. A master of organic architecture, his career spanned more than sixty years and would see the realization of almost 150 of his more than 500 designs. Apprenticed at the tender age of twelve to the Tulsa, Oklahoma firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush, he went on to become a partner with the firm in 1930, though he would spend the majority of his career working independently in Chicago, Oklahoma and Texas. Though lacking in academic credentials, he became a professor of architecture at the University of Oklahoma, and his notable public works would include the Shin'enKan pavilion for Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the iconic art deco Boston Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

However, it is for his residential projects that Goff is perhaps best known, particularly those of the 1950s, during which time he chaired the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture and enjoyed a close friendship with Frank Lloyd Wright. His single-mindedly creative and often flamboyant works from this period include the Gene and Nancy Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma (1950), the Joe Price House and Studio in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (1956, destroyed by fire in 1996) and the L. H. McCullough house in Wichita Falls, Texas (1954). It is for the McCullough house that the present table was designed, and its shape follows closely the overall geometric scheme of the project. Dodecagon in shape, the house was composed primarily of superimposed geometric shapes, the various spaces within radiating from a round central sky-lit living area and defined by retractable mahogany accordion walls.