S. C. Johnson & Son was founded in
Racine, Wisconsin, in 1886 and expanded rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1936, some of the company's executives worked in a wooden house and a series of annexes next to the company's existing factory and warehouse. Hibbert Johnson initially wanted to expand the existing buildings before deciding on an entirely new campus. Samuel Johnson later reflected that his father "was tired of us being seen as a little old family enterprise in a little town in the Midwest".
Original building Design Before starting his new building, Hibbert visited
The Hershey Company's headquarters in
Hershey, Pennsylvania, for inspiration. Upon his return to Racine, Hibbert hired
J. Mandor Matson to design an office building near S. C. Johnson's existing headquarters. The initial drawings had few windows, if at all, and a revised blueprint from 1936 included windows. Ramsey and S. C. Johnson's advertising manager, William Connolly, were also unable to suggest suitable revisions. Jones visited Wright's
Taliesin studio in
Spring Green, Wisconsin, twice in July 1936 to discuss the proposed building, whereupon Wright characterized Matson's design as a crematorium. That month, Hibbert went to Taliesin to talk with the architect. Despite their personal disagreements, Hibbert asked Wright to design a headquarters for S. C. Johnson & Son in Racine, The architect offered to design a building costing $200,000 (much less than what Matson was asking), Wright promised that "the Johnson Administration Building is not going to be what you expect", Wright replaced Matson as the architect in late July 1936, less than a month before construction was supposed to begin; Hibbert's daughter
Karen reported being elated that her father had decided to hire Wright. Shortly afterward, Wright visited the site that S. C. Johnson had acquired in Racine. At the time, the site had a series of wood-frame houses, a few small stores, and a cinema. Wright's plans for the Johnson Administration Building were based on his earlier, unbuilt design for the
Capital Journal offices in
Salem, Oregon, which included a series of mushroom–shaped columns and translucent walls. Wright tried to convince the company to relocate to the Racine suburbs, Ramsey and Connolly were vehemently against the idea, but Wright continued to promote it until his wife
Olgivanna warned that S. C. Johnson might fire him, too. Two of Wright's apprentices,
John Howe and
William Wesley Peters, recalled that Wright rushed to draw his ideas but that he also focused on perfecting the building's geometry, particularly the grids of columns. Wright allocated space to each of S. C. Johnson's departments based on what each department needed. On August 9, 1936, ten days after he was hired, Wright went to Racine to show the plans to Hibbert and other S. C. Johnson officials. Hibbert requested two changes to the plans, although he retained Wright's draft plan for the most part. By the end of the month, Wright asked three apprentices to create a model of the building.
Initial work and delays Hibbert Johnson suggested that his good friend
Ben Wiltscheck be hired as the building's
general contractor. Wright, who was typically adversarial toward contractors, saw Wiltscheck as "good help for us in getting this building properly built". and Peters and
Mendel Glickman finalized the building's structural details. Apprentices at Taliesin created 18 to 20 drawings, many of which depicted the building's great workroom, a relatively simple space. Concurrently, Wright's apprentice
Robert Mosher had been overseeing the construction of
Fallingwater,
Edgar J. Kaufmann's country estate in Pennsylvania, when Wright forced Mosher to return to Wisconsin after
a dispute involving reinforcing steel. Mosher was instead appointed to oversee the construction of the S. C. Johnson Administration Building, while another apprentice,
Edgar Tafel, took Mosher's place in Pennsylvania. Wiltscheck and Mosher worked out of a nearby shack. The Wisconsin Industrial Commission refused to approve plans for various aspects of the building, citing building-code violations, but ultimately approved most of these plans with few changes. in particular, inspectors felt that the columns were too thin to support the loads that had been indicated in Glickman's drawings. In the meantime, work continued. By the end of the year, the building's estimated cost had increased to $300,000. Wright, who had designed just two buildings in the previous half-decade, had severely underestimated the materials and labor expenses. Mosher returned to Pennsylvania in January 1937 to supervise Fallingwater, and Tafel was appointed as the Johnson Administration Building's supervisor. Tafel lived in a former bar across from the Administration Building's site, playing an organ as entertainment. The same month, S. C. Johnson bought a parcel immediately northwest of the Administration Building, as Ramsey wanted to construct a truck-repair garage there. Not all of Wright's proposals for the building were implemented; for example, Hibbert rejected a proposed pipe organ in the great workroom. In several instances, Wright finalized plans for certain parts of the building as they were being constructed. He spent one year adjusting the details of glass tubes that were to be installed on the facade. Meanwhile, state officials refused to approve the columns because they were not of sufficient thickness. The concrete for the column was poured in late May, and Wright began testing the column that June. at which point Wright ordered workers to pull down the column. and by that August, some of the walls had been finished. Work had to be halted in late October 1937 after Wright, with little warning, revised plans for the squash court and the cafeteria–theater space. During early 1938, Wright refined his plans for the interiors while at
Taliesin West, his studio in Arizona. After
Corning Glass began delivering
Pyrex glass tubes for the building's facade, disagreements emerged over who should install the glass tubes. Progress was further delayed by
labor strikes during early 1938; for example, laborers called a strike to demand higher wages, and material deliveries were delayed when truckers went on strike. Although Wiltscheck and Wright's apprentices all raised concerns about the use of Pyrex tubes for the
skylights, which they claimed would leak, Wright refused to consider alternative materials. Hibbert secretly ordered standard glass skylights anyway; Tafel told Wright about this change, and Hibbert fired Tafel in retaliation. Hibbert eventually agreed to rehire Tafel and use Pyrex skylights after Wright threatened to resign over this dispute. The iron pipes in the floors were installed in April 1938, followed by the pouring of concrete floor slabs during June and July. Peters recalled that, just before the second floor was ready to be poured, he had to reinforce some of the first-floor columns after discovering that Wright had made a last-minute change to the placement of the second-floor columns. Olgivanna Wright recalled that her husband had become increasingly agitated because contractors and laborers requested constant clarifications on various aspects of the project. S. C. Johnson's board of directors, who were also displeased at the slow pace of construction, stopped paying Wright and Wiltscheck. Wright postponed a trip to England so he could oversee the building's construction. By that December, Wright was again ill with pneumonia, and the opening of the building had been postponed to early the next year. Having completed the Administration Building, Hibbert asked Wright to design the
Wingspread mansion outside of Racine, which was also completed in 1939. The building had exceeded its original budget considerably;
Fisk Johnson, one of S. C. Johnson's subsequent chief executives, estimated that the structure's cost was half of the company's entire net worth. Local
Boy Scouts,
Cub Scouts, and
Sea Scouts members were invited to greet people for the building's official opening that April. Around 23,000 or 26,000 members of the public visited the building on April 23, 1939, The Johnson Administration Building also attracted other visitors, including a wide variety of architects and the animator
Walt Disney (who was an acquaintance of Wright's). The caulking between the Administration Building's Pyrex glass tubes began to peel off after it was completed, causing leaks, which continued for several years. Glass tubes sometimes fell from the ceiling as well, and because the great workroom's light bulbs were wedged between the glass tubes, workers needed to remove the tubes with a special scaffold every time they had to replace the light bulbs. Hibbert wanted to avoid experimental design details, a main source of delays in the Administration Building's construction. or Hibbert had suggested developing a tower instead of a conventional low-rise building. Wright's initial plans for the research building called for a 18-story tower, with a hollow core in a fashion similar to
Buckminster Fuller's 4D Apartment Tower and
Dymaxion houses. The building would have two small elevators and two small stairs, later combined into one larger stair and elevator each. Additionally, there were to be a courtyard around the tower, a two-story "U"-shaped building surrounding the courtyard, and footbridges connecting the Administration Building and the Research Tower. Wright continued to fine-tune his design for the Research Tower during 1944, and he briefly considered constructing the tower to the west of the Administration Building, across Howe Street. By that September, Wright's plans called for a 16-story tower and two additional stories above the existing carport. Hibbert signed off on the revised plans in November 1944. Steinle, who was tasked with determining how the equipment would be laid out, commissioned a
scale model of the proposed tower. Ben Wiltscheck agreed to be rehired as the tower's general contractor. William Wesley Peters was responsible for the tower's structural calculations, a particularly difficult task for him, as no similar structure had been built before. Work on the plans was delayed in 1945, as Wright had not finalized his drawings, thus preventing Peters and the tower's mechanical engineer from preparing their respective drawings. That August, Samuel Lewis was hired as the mechanical engineer. Some parts of the tower were redesigned after Lewis found that there was not enough space for utilities in some parts of the building. S. C. Johnson announced in November 1945 that they had rehired Wright to design a 15-story laboratory tower next to the Administration Building. Sketches of the laboratory tower were displayed in
Milwaukee, These plans called for a laboratory tower and several ancillary structures hosting various S. C. Johnson departments. S. C. Johnson ultimately agreed in 1948 to pay Wright based on a cost estimate of $2 million, with the stipulation that Wright not receive further compensation if construction went over budget. S. C. Johnson received partial approval for the tower only after lobbying from U.S. Representative
Lawrence H. Smith. By January 1948, workers were nearly finished excavating the research tower's site and were pouring foundations for an extension to the carport. The foundation was poured that February; according to one magazine, the project involved the largest
continuous concrete pour in Wisconsin at the time. Laborers began pouring the floor slabs for the tower in mid-1948. Separate wooden
formwork was built for the square main stories and the circular mezzanines; to create the hollow floor slabs, the concrete for each story was poured in two sections. The lowest story took seven weeks to pour, but workers became more efficient at pouring concrete as the structure ascended, eventually pouring one floor every three weeks. Because laborers had difficulties using the pumpcrete machine, they instead used conventional
mixers on the ground. Further delays were incurred because the concrete had to be poured with as few deformities or inaccuracies as possible. As such, concrete work did not reach the fifteenth floor until mid-1949; the concrete frame
topped out that October. Hibbert agreed to pay an increased
insurance premium in exchange for not adding fire sprinklers. Wright also thought up ways to prevent the Research Tower's Pyrex windows from leaking. As a temporary measure, wooden sheeting was placed around the building in late 1949 while the Pyrex tubes were being delivered. After the laboratory equipment was delivered in April 1950, workers installed the equipment and the glass at the same time. The tower was dedicated on November 17, 1950. Hundreds of guests, including scientists, educators, and industrialists, were invited to the ceremony, where Wright said that "the building speaks eloquently for itself". == Post-completion ==