Edited By Luca GuidoStephanie 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.



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.