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.
if my work place was nice, up to date, and wasn't full of the harshest lighting available, yeah it'd be a lot more tolerable. being trapped in a stinky, dilapidated building with sterile white lighting is not enjoyable at all
"Open office" is a cattle pen.
Open office with four foot high desk partitions, glass meeting rooms and harsh fluorescent lighting ....
louder than necessary and rather hellish