This is me.
And I’m about to enter a building that was the future of work in 1939.
First I tripped a bit.
This Frank Lloyd Wright Building —
It got a lot right about what the office would be like and how it would feel
for the rest of the 20th century.
And I wanted to try working in the place where it that started.
I first learned about this office 5 years ago.
Most open offices were designed by consultants.
This one was designed by a genius.
It was built as the new headquarters for SC Johnson in Racine, Wisconsin.
It came in an era when often offices were small and cramped or private.
This building had a spacious central room instead
meant to encourage the spread of ideas.
Architectural Forum was so excited
they did a special spread on just the plans for this building.
Today, SC Johnson makes stuff like Glade, Pledge, Ziploc
Duck, Canard, Pato.
Those are all the same thing...
duck.
Yea.
But in 1939, it was basically a “Wax company” that wanted more for its managerial class.
They hired Frank LLoyd Wright to design it and he aimed for
“as inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was to worship in.”
They still do tours and most of the employees have moved to other buildings.
So that meant, I'd be able to get a desk there.
I have worked remote for four years, making this face.
My coworkers are a list of names I click on.
I work next to a Pack N' Play.
So, I wanted to try something different.
The most striking feature of the administrative building is a central room:
the Great Workroom.
Its main feature is the columns.
Architect Jonathan Lipman wrote a book about the SC Johnson headquarters.
If I'm going on, sort of, a scavenger hunt of interesting features in that room
what should I be looking for?
When people enter this room
it is very common that they're kind of gobsmacked.
The most common metaphor for this room is that it is subaqueous
that is that you feel like you're underwater, you're in maybe a lily pond.
And what contributes to that?
Well, clearly, the columns — the famous columns.
A key principle across Wright’s work is compression and expansion.
The idea of entering a tight space and then exploding into an open one.
These columns are what make the expansion possible in this room.
Wright called these “Dendriform” columns.
That means “tree shaped”.
And he said that each part had a calyx, stem, and petal.
18.5 feet at the petal
they have just a 9 inch diameter at the base.
They are so skinny that Wright and SC Johnson had to prove they were safe
by piling 12 tons of rocks on top.
And they did it until they hit 60 tons of rocks and stopped the test.
What did it feel like to be surrounded by these stalks of columns?
And have this light coming down from above.
So I went there.
I called my editor, Bridgett, from the airport.
It's really hot out here.
It's like 95 degrees.
Phil's out in the world.
Got to get the editor to weigh in.
We don't use Google Docs.
We just...
We always weigh in with one-on-ones.
Yeah, constant one-on-ones.
Constant FaceTime.
Do you have any final thoughts?
What I should be looking for on my trip?
Yeah, I mean, the main thing I think that you should do is actually work there.
Like, I think that's important, like—
Oh, no. Is that me or you?
Phil!
It overheated.
Oh no!
My phone overheated.
Get inside. Get to air conditioning.
But before I went to SC Johnson to work, I wanted a couple more tips.
So I met up with Mark Hertzberg
who’s a photojournalist, a Frank Lloyd Wright expert, and author of a book
about this Frank Lloyd Wright house, the Hardy House.
It came years before SC Johnson Wax
but you can see some of the same ideas at play.
You enter in this really tight hallway
which then blows out into the living room and lake view.
Compression and expansion.
There are all these custom furniture features too, which, well - just remember these.
Okay, so, Wright liked built-ins
and one of the magic features of a house for a little girl, like Anne Ruetz
growing up in the house when you're 5 years old in the two south bedrooms...
Wright has these chairs that come out.
Wow, that is so cool!
This house made every shot look cool which was great for me.
Like every frame just ends up looking cool.
Like, you look just cool right now, you know?
I am cool.
Yeah, it's your natural cool, of course, primarily.
But, you know, it's just like you've got all these leading lines right here.
Well, you know what, that is an interesting point
because one of the points I make to guests when we do tours
is it if you stand here in the bedroom this door frame
frames the door frame to the bedroom at the opposite end of the balcony.
And you also see the wood trim that's in the living room helping frame everything.
And Mark actually already got to work in the SC Johnson Great Workroom.
Like I wanted to.
It was a privilege to be allowed to sit in the Great Workroom
and to sit at the desk in one of the Wright chairs
and just to be able to look around.
It was a building I'd been in many times.
I'd photographed it many times.
But I had no cameras with me.
It's just me and my laptop and just to look around and to drink in the marvels of the design.
On the left is the research tower, opened in 1950,
while at the right you have the Great Workroom.
You enter through a carport to get there, very modern for 1939.
Compression.
You go past Frank’s signature, into the lobby, and then...
expansion.
SC Johnson’s archivist, Terri Boessl showed me around.
There was no reason to do this.
And yet you had company leadership at the time who who just really felt
the need to inspire his employees and have something here
in the middle of industrialized Racine.
We rode in the gold elevator at one point.
It was very gold.
Then I put my hands around the column.
People kept telling me about all the cool stuff that had happened, but it was only stuff
that you could see when the building was full of people.
People were collected in one space without walls.
Managers perched on the mezzanine but still open.
The chairs were originally elegant, three-legged inventions by Wright
but they tipped over when people arrived.
He wanted this three-legged design which it looks good
and it fits with his really streamlined look.
But as they told him: it's very unstable.
We're gonna lean
we're gonna reach for something, and the second we do
the chair's gonna tip over.
And beautiful ceiling?
It had flaws too.
For a long time, we had something called the bucket brigade
which was just — the people working in the space would get the bucket out from under
their desk and put it where the leak comes from.
But there was also falling glass.
You know, different pieces of the Pyrex tubing would fall down.
This building, it was designed before its time.
And we saw the custom desks, just like the ones that I had seen in the Hardy House.
So instead of pulling out a desk drawer, and the rooting through it to get to the back
you'd pull it out and you'd have the whole thing.
Wowwww!
Does it look pretty epic?
I mean...
I got to say, I don't want to sound...
mean...
but it kind of looks like a hotel lobby from this angle.
A very cool hotel lobby.
I'm only seeing a small bit of it.
I love the visitor lanyard, it's quite a look.
It's pretty legit.
I think I have to give it back unfortunately.
I can't really tell because of the way the exposure is, but is that just cool lights
up there, that are looking...
Yeah, so up there is kind of natural light augmented with artificial light,
And initially they didn't have enough light, so they had to add artificial light in there.
And then people got artificial lights at their desks and stuff, which Frank Lloyd Wright
was like mad about.
It's pretty cool.
And there's these crazy spiral staircases, too, that are kind of scary.
Thank you for talking with me about this.
Well good luck!
Bye!
Okay, bye!
Then, it was time.
I'd sit down.
I’d take a half hour.
And I’d work.
Should we establish that you're not Bridgett?
We should probably establish that I'm not Bridgett, because it is something that
people get confused about a lot.
In person, usually.
So, Bridgett's on vacation.
And you are editing the rest of this story.
So the point in this story, where we are right now, is that I am sitting down at my desk.
I really did think that I was going to work there for half an hour.
Yeah, you know, the whole point of the video.
That's the whole gimmick!
Yeah. It's the whole gimmick.
Yeah, exactly.
And then I sat down there and I was like...
I'm just at a laptop.
This is just a laptop.
This is not different from my laptop at home or my laptop in a coffee shop
or anywhere else.
Like, sitting at a laptop is just sitting at a laptop.
This is supposedly the greatest office in the world
and this is how you've been building this up, this is the greatest office.
The greatest place to work.
And...
you couldn't do it for a minute.
When Herbert Johnson built SC Johnson’s corporate headquarters
having a big showpiece headquarters for office workers was rare.
In 1939, this was the future of work.
This building, it’s the beginning of these big corporate campuses.
The Googles and Metas and Amazons owe a debt to campus here.
Wright later wrote that his building was the future.
"It was high time to give our hungry American public something truly 'streamlined'."
"That anybody could see the virtue of this thing called 'Modern.'“
Hi.
I live in the future called 2022.
I am in an office where I can video chat with a few clicks, across the world.
And still be by myself.
Is that expansion or compression?
It wasn't a real thing without any people around, without the energy of
being in that office.
Then I think, this space would've mattered.
But I didn't have that.
So in the end, the real SC Johnson was the friends we made along the way.
That's exactly...
I was so desperate to find out what it would feel like
to work in this room.
With the beautiful dendriform columns
and incredible colors...
But without people...
It’s just a background.