Edited By Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat and
Angela Person
Foreword By Aaron Betsky
PAPERBACK 9780806164601 | PUBLISHED: MARCH 2020
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.
“Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture successfully explains the evolution of education at American architecture schools at the time and emphasizes the curriculum created by Bruce Goff that developed into its own, distinct architecture school of design. By tracing the influence of Goff and those who came after him, a connection can be made across the United States in private practice and universities back to the University of Oklahoma. Many books have been written about Bruce Goff, but this book clearly defines the influence of Goff on the development of a solely American School of Architecture. After reading the essays and viewing the sketches and photographs, the reader will believe that was formed at the University of Oklahoma, too.”
Chronicles of Oklahoma
2022
Exhibition Catalogue Award
Honorable Mention
Society of Architectural Historians
2021
College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections,
and Exhibitions
Short-listed
2021
Oklahoma Book Awards
Winner
Oklahoma Center for
the Book
Luca Guido is a licensed architect, critic, and historian of contemporary architecture. He is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma where in 2016 he served as the Bruce Goff Visiting Professor and Chair of Creative Architecture.
Stephanie Pilat is Associate Professor and Director of the Division of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era.
Angela Person holds a PhD in Geography and is Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning for the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.
