The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Story and photos © Mark Hertzberg


The Tower is clad in 17.5 miles of Pyrex tube windows, and Wright's favored Cherokee red brick.

    It is a challenging walk up to the top floor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower on this hot, humid day.  The air conditioning is not on, because the building has been closed since 1982, when research operations moved into the former St. Mary’s Hospital building across the street.

The Tower is perched on the relatively slender core:






    Wright designed the building in 1944. Construction began after World War II, and was completed in 1950. The Tower’s architecture and history are familiar to scholars and admirers of Wright’s work. The interior, however, is a mystery to many of them. Although the company gets countless pleas for Tower tours, the building is closed for safety reasons, except for rare access accorded to a handful of special guests and architectural historians.

    Eric Valle, my escort, and I wind our way around the core of the building on the narrow stairs which measure only 29.5 inches across. Much of the core, which forms the base of the building, is a series of intertwined semicircles. The top floors are labeled 8 and 8M, because each floor has two levels, including the round mezzanine levels. My assignment is to document the interior of the building for a speech by Prof. Hilary Ballon to be presented at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy’s national meeting in October.

    Valle and I are drenched with perspiration when we get to 8M. We understand why people said it could be trying to work in the building when the midday summer sun hammered the 17.5 miles of Pyrex glass tube windows.

    This is a whirlwind, working tour of the building. We have little more than an hour in the building. It is a privilege to be allowed in the building once; I will not have a second chance to shoot anything that I missed. My camera clicks constantly as I shoot dozens of pictures for someone 900 miles away who needs to visualize the building in its present condition.

    Some cabinets have been taken apart, and some of the lower floors are used for storage, but, overall, the building is not much different than it must have been when the last scientist walked out of it, 25 years ago.

    The depth of Wright’s work in the Tower is evident as we move from floor to floor. Wright had designed two landmark office buildings and dozens of homes by 1944, but he had never been commissioned to design a building with the demanding technical specifications of a world-class scientific research facility.

    Wright had first proposed a “tap-root” tower for a project in New York City in 1929. That project, St. Mark’s in the Bowerie, was not built, but he did not forget his idea to have a tower built around a core which would be sunk into the ground. The core would be as strong as a tree trunk. The walls of the building would not be load-bearing. Instead, the floors of the building would be cantilevered from the core, just as the branches of a tree grow out of the tree trunk. Wright had conceived the tap-root tower for a 23-story apartment building. He chose to adapt that concept to a building which could meet the complex needs of Johnson’s scientists. The tower would compliment the adjacent streamlined, horizontal Administration Building. In fact, one of Wright’s early perspective drawings of the Administration Building site includes a tower at the far end of the property.

    There are nooks and crannies in the Tower; there are variations in the shape of the handrails on the stairs; and in a subtle detail that perhaps says the most about his work, in some areas there is a course of bricks just below the mezzanine, which gradually tapers down to about one-eighth of an inch. 
 

 

    Wright initially proposed two stairs, and an elevator, for the brick core.  Dr. J.V. Steinle, the company’s research director, overruled him. There would be only one staircase, so that the elevator could be larger, to carry freight. That decision arguably helped seal the building’s fate, because there was no second means of escape. In addition, Wright had refused to allow a sprinkler system for aesthetic reasons. The building could not be opened again, once it closed in 1982, unless another means of escape could be added. The only solution, which was drawn in 1974, was to add an ungainly external staircase. The company rejected the proposal because it would detract from the design of the landmark building.


The elevator is the central part of each level of the Tower.

There are narrow restrooms in the core.



 
Narrow stairs wind around the core. 

    Each floor of the Tower is unique. Unlike the Great Workroom in the Administration Building, there are few standard pieces of furniture that can be used anywhere in the building.  Lab tables are sandwiched between the Cherokee red brick walls of the core and the glass and brick exterior. Many of the bricks, cabinets and laboratory tables are curved, as they follow the lines of the core and the circular mezzanines. They had to be custom built to fit the building’s design. Clearly, functional excellence, rather than economy, guided Wright and the company.

There are alternating square and round (mezzanine) levels:



  
 



  This is a working building, not one of Wright’s landmark houses perched over a waterfall or a wooded ravine. There is no exterior view; one sees only the translucent tubular glass walls from inside.

    Some say that the building was a practical failure. The late Sam Johnson, whose father H.F. Johnson Jr., commissioned the Tower, acknowledged in an interview in 2001 that the building “didn’t work as well as Wright envisioned, because he didn’t understand how scientists work together,” He contrasted the open space of the Great Workroom with the layout of the Tower, and noted the “inconvenience of going into an elevator” to consult with colleagues in a building that had no conference rooms or long hallways.    
   
    Still, there were some scientists who enjoyed the relative isolation of working in the Tower. “In many ways it was a functioning failure, but it was a spiritual success,” Johnson said as he reflected on the building’s legacy. He emphatically disputed the notion that the building was a complete failure. The proof is fourfold, he said, as he mentioned Raid, Pledge, Edge, and Glade, the company’s largest brands. “They all got hatched up when the Tower was there. Who’s to say that wasn’t the Wright influence?”

    I want to linger in the Tower, but our time is up. I had last visited the building six years ago. I see this brick and glass icon of the company almost daily, but I had forgotten many details of Wright’s interior design. It is a stark interior, to be sure, but it is fascinating to see how Wright adapted his tap-root tower concept for Johnson’s scientists.

    Sam Johnson said there was no question about maintaining the building, “Its beauty and creative expression is symbolic of what this company and this family are all about.” Wright, he added, “is a part of what we are and what we represent. He stood up for what he believed in, and championed new ideas and free expression.” As for the maintenance costs, “No one likes the maintenance costs. It’s like protecting your home ground. If you outgrow it, which we’ve done, it’s still our roots, our symbol.”

    Though the Tower may never reopen, it stands literally and figuratively as a beacon for the company. “The Research Tower will always be an icon of SC Johnson.  Its daring design embodies SC Johnson’s spirit of innovation and commitment to excellence,” said Fisk Johnson, Chairman and CEO of SC Johnson.  “Throughout the Research Tower’s history, it has captured the public’s eye and sparked its imagination.  We trust this legacy will continue for years to come.”

The racks that hold the Pyrex window tubes are braced against the mezzanines by hinged metalwork.

  

A conference room is on the second floor of the Tower.





A window with a "W" motif looks out from the single door at the base of the tower, toward the north portico of the complex.

Bibliography:

Lipman, Jonathan, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings. New York: Dover Books: 2004

Carter, Brian, Johnson Wax Administration Building and Research Tower. London, Phaidon Press, Ltd., 1998