Frank and Ruth Cole House, Park Ridge, Illinois, Perspective

Following Bruce Goff’s work in Oklahoma, his early designs for low-cost houses in the suburbs of Chicago show a tentative modern vocabulary of brick and glass. With his designs for Frank Cole in 1939, however, the ambitious, prismatic geometries of his early work returned on a new domestic scale. Hewing to a strict budget, Goff used unfinished wood planks for a row of rhombus-shaped windows in the relatively modest street facade. On the garden side of the house, Goff broke with the rectilinear boundaries of the building by incorporating tall triangular trellises that continue the lines of the fenestration and then explode beyond the roofline to frame a screened porch on the second floor. This exploration of three-dimensional geometries would define the most ambitious houses of his mature career.