Frank Lloyd
Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings
by Jonathan Lipman
Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 2003
224 pp., illus. 172 b/w. Paper, $19.95
ISBN 0-486-42748-X.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, USA
ballast@netins.net
Nearly 20 years ago, the Herbert F. Johnson
Museum of Art at Cornell University organized
a traveling exhibition that opened at
the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick
Gallery in Washington, D.C., and was afterwards
installed, during the next two and a half
years, at 10 other major museums across
the country. Titled "Frank Lloyd Wright
and the Johnson Wax Buildings: Creating
a Corporate Cathedral," the exhibition
focused on the planning, design, and construction
of the two major components (the Administration
Building completed in 1939, and the Research
Tower in 1950) of the corporate headquarters
of the Johnson Wax Company in Racine,
Wisconsin. To accompany the exhibition,
a book-length study was produced by Rizzoli,
of which this newly published book is
an unabridged reissue. Its author is the
(then young) architectural historian who
curated the original exhibition and has
since gone on to write other books about
the architect, presided over the Frank
Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, and
served as an expert consultant for a number
of Wright restorations. Born in 1953,
only three years after the completion
of the Johnson Research Tower, Jonathan
Lipman has devoted much of his life to
becoming an authority on Wright's creative
process and to preserving the structures
that evidence that. Not surprisingly,
this is a book of unusual detail, some
of it fairly technical and, yet, because
of the varied and interesting mix of vintage
photographs, architectural drawings, accounts
by his apprentices and other eyewitnesses,
the sometimes combative letters between
architect and client, and all kinds of
behind-the-scene sources, it really does
read like a novel, while also maintaining
the more serious tone of scholarly sleuthing.
Of particular interest is Lipman's insightful
discussion of Wright's Prairie Style residential
buildings (which were "extroverted and
integrated with the landscape") in contrast
to his public buildings, the Johnson Wax
buildings among them, which were almost
always closed off from their surroundings
(being "introspective and virtually windowless").
As in any book about the colorful and
then controversial architect, amusing
anecdotes abound, such as the short-lived
suggestion by the company's board of directors
that the finished building should be identified
by a neon sign. One of Wright's underlings
answered: "When this building is finished
it is going to be such a contribution
that you won't need any sign. After all,
there's no sign on the Washington Monument."
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 4,
Summer 2004).