Wisconsin Journal

Number 31

23 June 1998



It's gotten warm and humid here, with a thunderstorm blowing through

about every three days to cool things off. Packing progresses apace,

and Luke passed his driving test today, so he'll be able to trade

off on the driving on the way home.



For our final Wednesday excursion, Kaye and I drove over to Racine,

mainly to see the SC Johnson Wax building (1939). The tours start in

the Golden Rondelle theater, which was the Johnson Wax pavillion at

the 1964-5 New York World's Fair. It looks like a large gold flying

saucer, and was dismantled and reassembled in Racine in 1966. At

the fair, it had large white arches overhead, and ramps leading in

and out. Now it sits on kind of a pedestal structure. They weren't

showing movies in it that day, but we did get to look at the theater.

One of the films shown regularly is "To Be Alive," which was the

film shown in it at the World's Fair.



The layout of the office complex is interesting, with the main

building wrapped around a parking courtyard, rather than parking

wrapped around the building. You cross this courtyard to enter

the Administration Building, where you see two Frank Lloyd Wright-

designed sculptures, depicting Winnebago Indians. The male is

all angles, and female is all arcs and spheres. In the center

of the courtyard is the Lab Building, which is 14 stories tall,

with all the floors cantilevered out from a central core. At

ground level, the walls don't extend beyond the core, which almost

makes you miss the building as you walk under it on the way

to the Admin Building. The upper floors alternate square and round,

with the square floors reaching to the outside walls, and the

round floors forming balconies above them. Unfortunately, the

tour doesn't include the lab building. The labs have since moved

to other space, and the lab building is empty, as it hasn't been

possible to get an occupancy permit for other uses.



The great workroom of the Administration Building must be one of the

most photographed Frank Lloyd Wright interiors. It is two stories

high, and the roof is supported by mushroom-shaped pillars that are

smaller at the bottom than at the top. The design of the pillars

was a cause for concern when getting a building permit approved.

State engineers decided that each pillar must support 12 tons.

We saw a brief movie of a test pillar being loaded with 60 tons

of sand, before being intentionally collapsed. The other distinctive

feature of the building is that many of the windows and skylights

are made of stacked up pyrex tubing. This treatment proved

very hard to make watertight, so in some places it has been replaced

by textured glass or by plexiglass tubing, which expands and contracts

less, and which can be caulked pretty well with silicone sealer.

(Trivia question: The design of this building was adapted from

a design for a very different use. What was it?*)



The big room is not particularly noisy, even though it is full

of desks without partitions. One reason is that the floors are

all underlaid with cork. Wright designed all the furniture for

the space, and some original pieces are still on view, but the

furniture in use now has a modified design. It still reflects

the original oval design, and all the metal surfaces are painted

Cherokee Red, like the originals. Even desk lamps and file racks

have that color. The original desk chairs were designed with three

wheels, and proved to be quite tippy, especially on the bare

floors before carpet was installed. (And those floors were always

kept highly waxed!) Wright was finally prevailed upon to design

a four-wheeled version, but only after he himself tipped over in

a three-wheeler when reaching for something (so the story goes).



There is a lot of brass trim in the building, including two round,

open elevators that are fondly referred to as the "birdcages."

Behind each elevator are airshafts that come up from the cooling

system in the basement. (It's claimed to be the first commercial

building in Wisconsin with air conditioning.) The original heating

system used pipes embedded in the floor, but it proved too weak

and too hard to control to heat the building adequately. However,

the pipes have proved useful as conduits for computer cables.

We proceeded up a curving staircase behind the elevators to

the second-level balcony, to get the view you see in most photos.

Before I had toured the building, the picture in my mind's eye

was that the workroom was set below ground level, which is undoubtedly

due to all the pictures being taken from above (and maybe because

the room has no windows at the first-floor level). We got to see

the cafteria area, which used to also serve as a theater. Against

one wall, opposite a raised dias, you can see windows into a projection

booth. From upstairs you get a good view of the beautiful

brickwork. There were over 200 shapes of bricks used in the building,

and mortar is indented on the horizontal joints and flush on the

vertical joints, to add to the horizontal look of the building.



On the way out, we stopped in a room under the lab tower to

hear a little about the history of the company. The original S.C.

Johnson got his start selling parquet flooring. When customers

began asking about care of the floors, he and his son formulated

a special paste wax for them. Pretty soon they were selling more

wax than flooring, and eventually switched over to household

products entirely. In addition to custodial supplies and Johnson

Wax, the company manufactures a lot of brands you have likely

heard of: Raid, Glade, Off, Drano, Edge, Pledge, Windex, Skintimate,

Fantastik, Shout, Ziploc and Handiwrap. And they do make brass

polish.



We headed into downtown, and walked out to the marina to have

lunch. The city has done a nice job of renovating the waterfront,

with the marina and a festival center. After lunch, Kaye headed

off to an Indian artifacts store that is owned by the ex-stepfather

of a colledge student who works in the Indian store behind our

house. I walked over to the city historical museum, which is

located in a Carnegie library built in 1904. Outside is a plaque

commemorating an anniversary of the Sokol Mladocech, which is

a Czech cultural and physical fitness society. (Hope I got the

spelling right.)



Malted milk was invented in Racine in 1873 by the Horlick brothers, as

a food for invalids and infants. It was originally made by mixing

wheat flour with barley malt, letting the enzyme in the malt do

its work, then mixing the result with milk, and evaporating the

whole lot. It was sold as a powder and also pressed into tablets.

At different times the tablets were advertized as "a complete

lunch" and as the perfect food for dieters. The first advertizing

for malted milk stressed the pure ingredients and sanitary conditions

under which it was made. The company then sought publicity by

supplying free tablets to explorers and expeditions, such as a

1931 submarine expedition to the North Pole. After WWII, the company

discovered that their product was mostly consumed by children,

and introduced chocolate-flavored malt products.



Racine is also the original home of Hamilton Beach appliances.

(Hamilton was an advertising manager, Beach was an E.E.) The

business got started in the 1900s selling a fractional horsepower

motor that could take various attachments: knife sharpener,

fan, cake mixer, carpet sweeper and silver polisher. It could

also be used to motorize a sewing machine. Beach was able to

both shrink the size of the motors, and up the speed to 7500 rpm,

which made it feasible to start embedding individual motors in

appliances. In 1916 they introduced their drink mixer for soda

fountains, followed by sewing machines (SewEZ brand), vacuum

cleaners, hairdryers, vibrators, an "iceless freezer bottle",

blenders and electric knives. They also brought out some non-motorized

products, such as electric blankets, ice-cream scoops and coffee pots.

The company was bought by Proctor-Silex, and his since moved out

of Racine.



There were exhibits on other companies that used to be in the

city. Racine had about ten differnt luggage companies. The Mitchel

and Lewis company started in 1853 making wagons, sleighs and plows,

but made only wagons during the Civil War. The owner founded

the Mitchel Motor Company in 1902, to make motorized bicycles,

motorcyles and automobiles. In 1918 they were supplying 4-wheel

drive vehicles to the Army, by virtue of their chief engineer

holding the patent on 4WD. After many ups and downs the company

went bankrupt in 1923, and its plants were bought out by Nash and

by Hupp. (Remember the Huppmobile?) There was an American Motors

plant in town until the 80s, I think. J.I. Case (tractor makers)

still has a big plant in town.



The day was capped off with a visit ot Wingspread, the house that

Frank Lloyd Wright built for H.F. Johnson, around the same time

the Johnson Wax Administration Building was going in. HFJ had the

house built to live in with his first wife, but she died before it

was completed. FLW persuaded him to go ahead and finish it, and

he lived in it from 1939 to 1959 with his second wife, his two

kids and her two kids. The second wife didn't like it all that

much, since it was kind of a memorial to the first wife. It didn't

help that Wright once rearranged her furniture one morning at 4am.

She eventually had another house built nearby, of more traditional

style, which was called simply "The House" (implying the other is

not?). After 1959, Wingspread was given over to the Johnson Foundation

to use as a conference center. It's been modified a little bit, and

has just reopened after four years of structural repairs, but the

great thing is that it's free to visit, and they just let you

walk around the place on your own.



Wingspread was the largest single-family residence Wright designed.

It has a large central area, with a huge brick pillar in the middle

that has five fireplaces set into it. This pillar supports the

top of a "tepee" roof (or kind of supports it--the three rows

of clerestory set into roof make it kind of weak for its weight;

it was strengthened during the restoration). If you go up a spiral

staircase next to the chimney, you come out in a "lantern" that

looks kind of like the top of a lighthouse. It was added at the

request of Johnson, and his children used to watch for him to

come home from there. From the central area there are four wings,

making a cross shape. They hold the master suite, the children's

rooms, kitchen with servants quarters and guest room with carports

(which have since been converted to offices). The master suite

is the only wing with a second floor, which extends over part

of the central area as a balcony. There is extensive brickwork

in here as well, using custom-made brick from the same Illinois

brickworks as made it for the Administration Building. The mortar

has the same treatment, with grooved horizontal joints and flush

vertical ones. The mortar in the vertical joints is even colored red,

to emphasize the horizontal lines. The floors in the master suite

are of the same kind of edge-sawn plywood used in the studio of the

Hillside School at Taliesin. (Note: a recent storm toppled a 225-year-old

oak through the roof of Wright's personal studio at Taliesin.)



The house has several innovative features, such as a built-in sound

system (that still works) and heat through pipes in the floors

(didn't work there either). The most unusual feature, in my view,

is the dining room table, which retracted into the kitchen so it

could be reset between courses. The family didn't make much use

of it in that way, as it tended to leave people clutching their

salad forks and staring at the feet of the person opposite.



After we left the house, we walk and drove around the grounds a

little, then went by a nearby lighthouse before heading home.



That's a wrap,

Dave



*The original design was for a newspaper production facility to be

built in Salem, Oregon.