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Built between 1936 and 1939, the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Wisconsin is one of the most famous office buildings. Among the countless stories reported by Frank Lloyd Wright in his autobiography, a long paragraph is devoted to Hibbard (“the Hib”) Johnson, the third-generation owner of the large wax and cleaning chemical company S.C. Johnson Wax, founded in 1886.
According to Wright, father of “organic” design, the project represents “an experiment in design and construction”: an introverted building with curvilinear forms, covered externally by a continuous brick surface, lightened by the use of Pyrex glass tubes shaped like lily pads with a circular base and culminating in large “umbrellas” on the ceiling, interspersed with realized skylights that allow even diffusion of lighting, while not allowing the view of the outside. The most daunting experiment in the entire project is, in fact, the great workroom, a large open space 40 by 60 meters, six meters high, supported by rows of 'dendriform' columns: like stems rising on tiptoes on small brass shoes fixed to the floor.
This is where Johnson Wax's secretarial employees work side by side, while the administrators' stations are housed on the mezzanine level. In the spirit of organic architecture, Wright also proposed designing the building's entire furniture system-from custom chairs to numerous Johnson Wax office furnishings that the company still uses today.
In 1937 the designer designed an early version of the desks and chairs, trying to keep them as connected as possible to the style of the entire building: straight, rounded forms are the most effective language for reflecting the proportions, orthogonal and curvilinear geometries of the building. The three wooden desk tops, rounded at the ends, extend well beyond the structure (made of aluminum with a cruciform section), recalling the detail of the cantilever applied for the architecture; the frame of the structure communicates perfectly with the direction of the bricks and glass tubes of the surfaces. The circular shapes provided for the chair echo on a smaller scale those of the capitals of the lily pad columns of the large open space.
Furniture designed by Wright for the Johnson Wax Administration Building today, decades later, is the focus of a reissue: the Frank Lloyd Wright Racine Collection by the American company Steelcase. “We have faithfully matched the style and finishes of the original furniture, implementing only subtle adjustments to the proportions and scale of the collection to support today's worker,” the company explains. The furniture family is declined in two versions: Signature, a very faithful re-edition of Wright's original designs, and Modern, less pedestrian reinterpretations aimed at contemporary comfort.
