Ruth and Sam Ford House, number 1, Aurora, Illinois, Elevation Showing Wall

Bruce Goff designed buildings for the Navy during World War II and there became acquainted with the versatile Quonset hut, a demountable steel structure with a distinctive, half-tube shape. This experience fueled Goff’s increasingly experimental approach to architecture after the war. When asked to create a home for the director of an arts school in Aurora, Illinois, Goff returned to the Quonset hut, whose semicircular ribs created an opportunity for spatial play. Military materials found their way into other parts of the rounded structure as well—including army surplus rope in the ceilings and aircraft domes repurposed as skylights—creating a kind of postwar fantasy far removed from the formulaic ranch houses being built across the Chicago suburbs.