In 1955 on the outskirts of Norman, Oklahoma, the architect Bruce Goff built a house for two of his friends, local art teachers Nancy and Eugene Bavinger. Its red-brown, rough-cut rock façade is studded with spare glimmers of shallow-sea-blue glass, recycled from soda-bottle manufacturing plants (nearly two-thirds of the house was sourced from local junk piles). The façade covers a central vertical shaft and a curving wall, the two parts split by an origami-thin roof, sloping down to the ground and spiralling up to a metallic space needle. From the tip, antennae-like steel cables shoot downward, forming a teepee skeleton. Inside, the house is one large open room. An archipelago of small ponds sink into a floor of pale pink rock. Floating islands of plump corn-coloured carpet – mini-living rooms – hang from the ceiling and stairs by fishnet.

Goff, the subject of a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, built low-budget, spellbindingly idiosyncratic private houses in the remote, unfashionable interior of the United States, mostly in the Midwest. He called his method ‘individual architecture for individuals’. Before Robert Venturi learned from Las Vegas, Goff fashioned a style out of foraged roadside vernacular and prefab space-age glitter. ‘The Army and Navy surplus aesthetic’, as Reyner Banham put it. Goff loved slab-thick, pea-green or nacho-yellow shag carpets; lightly Disneyfied appropriations of Native American or Far Eastern exotica; repurposed military industrialisms; cheap shimmering jewels and thrift-store fantasias; UFO-like saucers and orbs; seashells and beads and crystals; plywood shingles and pink-foam insulation. For Charles Jencks he was the ‘Michelangelo of Kitch’ – with ‘a heart of pure tinsel, pure cellophane rainstrip’, his work ‘emanations from the hidden psyche of the Great Unwashed’.

Born in 1904, Goff spent his youth in Henryetta, then Skiatook, then Hominy, then Tulsa, where he apprenticed with a local architecture firm. It was here that he became a lover of the Bauhaus, the abstractions of local indigenous cultures and, perhaps above all, the Midwestern elegance of Frank Lloyd Wright. When still a teenager, Goff wrote to Wright to ask how he could become him. Should he go to architecture school? In typical self-mythologizing, bootstrap-genius form, Wright told him to skip it. Goff took his advice. In 1920s Tulsa, he lived a demi-monde life among local painters, writers, teachers and musicians. He founded an avant-garde magazine, Tulsart, experimented with improvised music, threw masquerade parties – carving a space, way out on the plains of eastern Oklahoma, for a life of queer modernism. Goff wore odd-patterned polyester or green satin shirts with velvet pants, purple suede shoes and a Zuni-designed bolo tie.

These are the kinds of details offered by the exhibition, which is at once exhaustive and intimate, even novelistic. Alongside Goff’s built and unbuilt architecture – outlandish houses and extraterrestrial sketches for casinos and roadside resting stations – we encounter his clothes, furniture, collections of rocks, records and sci-fi magazines, the Japanese prints he hung around his house and the abstract paintings he made for friends. A player piano, the music roll composed by Goff, runs on a loop as you walk through the galleries. It’s a portrait of the architect as inventory.

Goff built his first major building when he was twenty-two, the soaring Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, which still adorns Tulsa’s skyline. It’s a nice church, but it’s not Goff. Wright was right: he didn’t need school, or Taliesin (where Wright had an apprentice-training workshop), or the Bauhaus (soon to reconstitute itself in Chicago, where Goff briefly relocated after his time in Tulsa). To become Wright, Goff knew, meant becoming himself, and this would take time. After serving in the navy during the war, he returned home to chair the architecture school at the University of Oklahoma, where he taught until he was forced to resign, in the twilight of McCarthyism, for being gay. Meanwhile, he began designing private houses.

Forging his own path meant escaping both the generalizing tendencies of International Style modernism and the zombie-ism of ordinary suburban houses (‘ranchburgers’ as he called them). In Aurora, Illinois, he built a home for an art teacher and a civil engineer out of military-style Quonset-hut ribs, with skylights looted from a military aircraft; in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, he made two turkey farmers an orange, upswept, Japanese-roofed house in the middle of a cornfield with three deliriously windblown chimneys, touched up inside with sequins and tubes for artificially inseminating turkeys, retooled as decoration. In Edmond, Oklahoma, he designed a low-budget church for a community of oil workers to build themselves. He dreamed up a monumental cone, lit from above by a lone skylight and constructed partly out of oil pipes. Inside, a lavish sculpture made from ‘dime-store aluminium cake pans’ dangled from the teepee’s ninety-feet-high ceiling.

The paradox was that Goff’s mature architecture – which you recognize instantly; it couldn’t be anyone else’s – was in some profound sense not his own. He was one of the great absorbers of postwar American culture. He vacuumed up the land’s junkyards and crowdsourced his interior life. His designs emerged from collaboration and mutual affinity, between an oddball architect and his non-conformist middle-American clients. ‘Goff has orchestrated the great dreams of small people and not the reverse’, Jeffrey Cook wrote. Jencks, a little sneeringly, described Goff as the guru of ‘lower-middle-class taste’, as much for him a geographic as sociocultural distinction. But there was also a way in which Goff – someone who didn’t read the paper or even care much for going outside, but who stopped work each day at 4pm to watch Star Trek – managed to give expression to a more generalized, if subterranean sensibility. You can learn a lot about America by going into its hinterland and looking at its least conventional homes.

There have been many attempts to periodize Goff. The first postmodernist. The architect of the age of consumerism. The moment when the age of the common man fragmented into something private, unknowable, libertarian. All these characterizations touch him, but none express the essential point. America is a mythic, escapist country, a place whose ideological substrate resembles the interior of a tiki bar, awash in a plastic canon of popular images. The interesting thing is that, in the right hands, the images are plastic enough to be estranged beyond recognition. Goff – a Sun Ra or David Lynch of the American housescape – was one of our great estrangers. But his work began, one common client at a time, in Prairie Village, Ocean Springs, Vinita, Beaver, Sublette, Sapulpa.

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘Architecture of the Future?’, NLR 155.