Pity the SC Johnson employees, the 175 poor souls in marketing and sales that are relocating from its global headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, to a regional office in Chicago that opened last fall. Such a move would normally seem like an indisputable upgrade, a grand opportunity to make a new, exciting life in the big city—but in this case those workers are leaving behind the splendor of a landmark campus largely designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in exchange for leased space in a West Loop high-rise that the notoriously censorious Wright would probably deem conventional at best.
“Many of his public buildings, by contrast, were introverted, shutting out their surroundings and celebrating the interior space instead,” wrote Mark Hertzberg, a Wisconsin journalist and photographer, in his 2004 book Wright in Racine. Wright so disliked the industrial area surrounding the Johnson property that he initially attempted to convince Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr., the third-generation head of SC Johnson, to move the company out of Racine and adopt a version of the Broadacre City plan—Wright’s vision of a utopian community oriented horizontally (a foil to the traditional vertical city) that incorporated ideas about employee housing in addition to the desired company building. Johnson ultimately made it clear he had no interest in moving the headquarters or his workers.
Some 32 years after the Research Tower was shut down, the Administration Building that preceded it by more than a decade continues to be where much Johnson business is conducted each day. “This new building,” Wright told the Racine Journal Times in a preview of the opening cited by Hertzberg, “will be simply and sincerely an interpretation of modern business conditions designed to be as inspiring to live in and work in as any cathedral ever was to worship in.” The centerpiece—and the supreme highlight of Wright’s Johnson campus—is the Great Workroom, an immense yet elegant open office on the ground level. The space is broken up at regular intervals by off-white concrete columns that broaden out from an impossibly slim nine inches on the floor before being capped on the ceiling by a load-bearing disk 18 feet in diameter. Sunlight spills in from skylights between the columns, which have been compared to everything from mushrooms to lily pads to golf tees but are more accurately described as “dendriform,” or treelike. “Mr. Wright actually envisioned this whole space as if employees are working in a great forest with the columns being the trees,” the Johnson tour guide said, “the tubing being the leaves, and the light streaming through the leaves to make it a more natural working environment.” Wright also designed more than 40 pieces of furniture for the building in line with his “organic architecture” philosophy, which dictates that furnishings share the same conceptual principles as the structure they occupy.
