ART HISTORY - Frank Lloyd Wright and the Modern Cathedral

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Modern Cathedral

The Johnson Administration Building, begun the same year as the Kaufrnann House, inaugurated a new phase in Wright's style and introduced an original solution to the design of the modern workplace. As in his Larkin Building in Buffalo, Wright's goal in Racine was to seal off the interior from the surrounding industrial environment and provide a work space that was, as he said, "as inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was in which to worship." Light floods the large interior space from skylights and a clerestory through tubes of Pyrex glass. From the floor, the magical effect of this top illumination has often been likened to being underwater. The interior is a forest of slender columns tapering at the base like those at the Palace of Minos in Crete. The columns terminate at the top in broad, shallow "lily-pad" capitals that repeat the circular motif throughout. As was the case at Fallingwater, the building authorities mistrusted Wright's calculations; they doubted that the columns could carry the necessary load. It was no surprise to Wright when structural tests proved they could withstand several times the regulated weight. Encouraged by a sympathetic patron, Wright was able to design all details including desks and office chairs. In the 1940s, he was commissioned to add a research tower to the complex.



The fourteen-story structure is built of the same kind of glass and brick as the main building, with the addition of elegantly rounded corners. At night, the illuminated building, with its broad bands of translucent glass, also made of Pyrex tubes, takes on an ethereal glow.

Several of Wright's plans for tall buildings, such as his mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, were never realized. But following the research tower for Racine, he began work on the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which is actually based on his 1929 design for an apartment building in New York, St. Mark's Tower. It was, for its time, a daring concept: a cruciform "airplane propeller" structural unit sheathed in a glass shell and supporting cantilevered floors. Wright's notion of organic architecture was expressed through the central supporting core with its radiating, cantilevered platforms (as opposed to the standard box-frame construction), a structural scheme he likened to that of a tree. The boldly protruding terraces and soaring utility pylons gave the skyscraper the stylistic signature of its author. Wright continued to work until his death in 1959.