Reflections on the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine

As both an architect and a resident of Racine, I have long savored the moments when my commutes take me past the Johnson administration building, especially at dusk when the pyrex tubing glows from within.  I feel it is not only his best building in Racine (and he does have several outstanding examples here in this relatively small city), but one of the top five buildings of his career. There are a lot of ways to approach the historical significance of this building such as discussing its place in modern office design of the 1930s, or the drama of the testing of the dendriform columns, but I do not wish to repeat in this short reflection the well-worn narratives that have accompanied it.  Instead, I wish to briefly look at where its greatness lay, and perhaps by doing so, bring further some insights to its relationship with its newest addition, Fortaleza Hall.

While there seems to be little disagreement that Wright’s Johnson Administration building is a great building, what actually makes it so?  One way to approach this is to show how a work of architecture was ahead of its time and broke new ground within its historical context, changing the course of subsequent history in the process.  In the moving timeline of history, however, this achievement can be very short-lived, and the work can become dated very quickly.  However, Wright’s building here endures the test of time, somehow being as fresh now as it was eighty years ago.  Also, contrary to many famous buildings, this building did not have a very visible impact on office design in the same way that the Bauhaus of Europe had a decade earlier. Often, historical narratives of the work (and many of Wright’s other works) dismiss it by characterizing it as a singular work of an individual genius and place it in an insulated category by itself apart from the flow of modern historical progress. 

 The Administration building is a different kind of building, and certainly was more so when it was built in the 1930s. But being different is not the same as being good, much less great.  This seems to be an often missed point in today’s rush for novelty. The Administration Building has an absence of windows, which was not only contrary to typical traditional office building of that time but also much different from European modern architecture of that time as well where glass curtain wall construction was coming into its own (and still continues today). Instead we have large expanses of red brick wall with these ribbons of pyrex tubing in odd locations.  These both bring diffuse light into the building as well as emanate a glow of light seen from the exterior at night, but one cannot see through them. The story, of course, is that Wright didn’t want the building built in this nondescript older section of Racine where there was nothing worthwhile to look out upon, and so he closed it up and internalized it.  While this is significant, it doesn’t yet tell the whole story, perhaps not even the most important part of the story.  

I have a lithograph in my office of “The Great Workroom” by the artist William Suys, Jr. This image shows an artistic cutaway perspective of the building, showing inside and outside at the same time.  The ‘why’ of what Wright did became clearer as I was looking at this recently.  What is there in this building physically is there as an act of joy, of celebration, as a symphony of expression.  Not simply the joy of artistic expression itself, but the expression of how form relates to form in this architectural composition.  As Wright spoke of organic architecture as being in this part-to-whole relationship (integrated whole), it becomes more clear that what is essential here is that the relationship of forms here are not simply individual parts of a building serving various functions (such as a column’s function of holding up the roof, etc) but these forms are inflecting one to another, subordinating both to one another and into a unified and harmonious whole that gives it its greater meaning, its greatness.  So here, a column is not simply a pole holding up a roof, it is splayed out to become spatial definer, the poetry of the lily pad motif which itself gives way to the spaces in between filled with light from the sky. The pyrex tubing, is not just to provide the function of providing light but is composed of narrow horizontal tubes related to and interwoven with the brick module, like the threads woven into a larger fabric. All in all, it is like a symphony, like frozen music, to use a couple metaphors Wright himself used to describe his architecture.  

The glass tubing located at the top of the walls in the great work room dissolves the edge between roof and wall. But it also has a certain proportion to it —it is not too large or small, and thus there is a spatial compression between the bottoms of the lily-pad column capitals and the top of the brick wall where space is released to the infinite. Here, if time were to permit, one could show Wright’s antecedents in Idealism and how Hegel’s idea of the romantic stage of art as that where the material form gives way to the expression of spirit/mind (“Geist”) while yet pointing to the transcendent comes alive here.  In Edmund Burke’s view of the sublime, buildings are not supposed to be candidates, but this building at dusk I think comes close. Seeing the tower glow at dusk along with the ribbons of glowing pyrex interwoven into a composition of common red brick provides a rare moment of architectural inspiration and mystery. The mystery is here because Wright denied design clarity for a higher order in his mind. Design is not only about revealing but also concealing of the Idea.  

This brings us to a brief comparison to its new companion just across the courtyard, Fortaleza Hall, by Norman Foster, and how it reflects a sentiment separated by the Atlantic.  We have two very different buildings on the SCJ campus now (without getting into discussion of the Golden Rondelle) and there is a symbolic dialogue happening between the two.  What can we read of them?  What does it teach us of their genetic roots?  The Foster building is an intentional inversion of the Wright building.  It is very difficult to design a world-class building adjacent to or part of an architectural landmark.  The new architect must give deference to the landmark, both to keep clear the distinction between original and new, but also so as not to overpower it.  In this respect, the final location of Fortaleza off on the east end of the campus is much better than the original proposal on axis with the tower.  Other features show an interesting series of contrasts between old and new.

The glass in Fortaleza is as clear as Wright’s is obscure, a glass cylinder  made with low-iron glass for the ultimate clarity that could be had, which of course shows off the Carnuba airplane suspended in the exhibit space. The glass curtain wall is actually in tension, basically suspended from the roof rather than stacked up from the bottom up.  The roof itself seems to refer to Wright’s dendriform column tops but its support instead is from a series of narrow steel columns around the perimeter, given the overall impression of a pavilion rather than the cantilevered abstraction of the tree Wright based his design from.  

Foster took a cue from Wright’s cut limestone accents and made it the entire wall material.  This a much more precious material rather than the common red brick of the administration building.  Precision detailing, quality materials, and technological virtuosity reveal this to be a museum-level work of the 21st century.  

Conceptually, and to reference Hegel’s language in his philosophy of art, Fortaleza is a classical-stage building albeit in modern attire. Whereas Hegel’s third stage of art (the romantic) reveals spirit or mind’s expression surpassing materiality, his second, or classical stage of art is where the materiality and the spirit are in balance.  The parts in Fortaleza are separate and can stand independent. The glass oval main pavilion is separated from the brick supporting building behind it. The steel columns supporting the roof are self-contained and independent of the roof it supports. Throughout there is clear and precise delineation of where part meets part.  Wright blurs this line for his goal of the integrated whole.  One can even see this in his color scheme. Not only is his use of red too earthy for today’s tastes, but his use of red flooring (carpet and/or concrete) blurs the line between wall and floor which all interior designers today know requires contrast. 

Abstractly, the Foster building is like the Parthenon in Athens - classic, precise, and self-contained with modernist blood from its Bauhaus lineage. Wright’s Administration building is a Gothic cathedral — earthy, organic, mysterious and transcendent.