The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Alix Daniels in The Great Workroom, December 11, 2010.

The dendriform pillars were a radical innovation that the Wisconsin Industrial Commission hesitated to approve. Wright brought light into the Great Workroom through 47 miles of Pyrex-glass tube windows. He clad the exterior in his signature Cherokee red brick, with the mortar raked out between the bricks to emphasize the horizontal lines of the streamlined office building. The building is anything but an amalgam of squares: there are 200 different shapes of brick inside and out.

Alix and her classmates walked past Wright’s nearby Hardy House on Main Street, on their way back to school. Classroom activities then included drawing the Hardy House and having each student design a chair (that exercise was inspired by their having seen the three-legged chairs that Wright designed for the Administration Building).

“After going on the field trip I would sit at home drawing up floor plans, and the outside of what I wanted my house to look like. I also would spend time on a website helping to design houses (http://www.architectstudio3d.org/AS3d/design_studio.html). From then on I knew I wanted to be an architect.”

Those last words were magic for me to read. The field trip was the culmination of a project I initiated, that came to fruition with the help of SC Johnson, the Racine Unified School District, and a team from Leadership Racine. I grew up in New York City. We did not visit the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or the United Nations, well, because they were there. Visits were for tourists, not natives. I wondered if there was a parallel in Racine with our Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. 4500 people from around the world tour the Administration Building, but probably many Racinians have never toured it.

We put together an audio visual program to show fifth graders at the Golden Rondelle. They then tour the Great Workroom before returning to school for two days of Wright-related classroom activities. I had said at the outset that the program would be a success if one student decided to be an architect because of it. Our first success story was a fifth grader who said, “I walk past this building on the way to school, but never knew what it was until today.” And then Alix came along with a career choice made when she was eight, and which she sticks to as a 16-year-old.

Susan Anderson Ford looked beyond Frank Lloyd Wright when she decided to take her students to SC Johnson, “I can’t tell you that I have this wonderful things about FLW, but something came across my desk as a teacher that there was this wonderful opportunity for fifth graders; all this curriculum was developed which I thought was good. Based on the things I saw from Jane Barbian (who developed the classroom curriculum for the school district), I signed up to get the kit.”

She does not regret the decision. “To know that there is this young lady who I had a major impact in a really positive way on, perhaps for the rest of her life, that’s huge. We do a lot of really good things in the Racine public schools, and that’s a really good example. To hear of such a positive result of something I did, knowing it was good at the time, it was an awesome feeling, it was the kind of thing that makes you go back to work the next day.”