Goff on Goff: Conversations and Lectures - Tapa dura

In the 1950s, when Goff was head of the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture, Oklahoma emerged as the nation's most daring, avant-garde training ground in the discipline. This book, edited by Philip B. Welch, is compiled from tapes recorded with Goff's permission by Welch, who was one of Goff's students, a longtime friend, and himself a prominent teacher of architecture, Goff on Goff embodies some of the architect's most stimulating lectures and conversations. They have never before been available to readers.
Goff's now-legendary teaching method was to throw his students back onto themselves. He stressed honesty: honesty to materials and honesty to the creative impulse, the client, the total environment. An advocate of Gertrude Stein's "continuous present," Goff himself embodied the idea: the torrents of words, ideas, and exhortations that rolled from his tongue held his hearers spellbound.
The material reflects the breadth of Goff's mind and interests. A lifelong lover of the music of Debussy, he devotes much of one session to the composer's influence on his architectural work. To paraphrase Goff on music and architecture, ideas, not forms, are the best starting point for structuresand he once designed a house starting with the requirement that it have a revolving door. Goff praises traditional Japanese culture for its homogeneity - and immediately urges his students not to be daunted by the problems of diversity.