Still Working: The Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings That Never Became Museums

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Most of Frank Lloyd Wright's major commissions that survive today survive as museums: Fallingwater is a public trust, Taliesin and Taliesin West are foundation-run study centers and tour sites, the Guggenheim is a working museum by design. The two buildings Wright designed for S. C. Johnson and Son took a different path, one that says something about the difference between a patron who commissions a house and a patron who commissions a headquarters. The Administration Building, completed in 1939 with its forest of slender, tree-like dendriform columns widening into lily-pad capitals and its ceiling of Pyrex glass tubing, was built to be worked in, not toured, and largely still is: it remains an active S. C. Johnson corporate office today, with the company offering public tours around its own operating schedule rather than the reverse. The Research Tower that followed it, built 1947 to 1950 as a cantilevered laboratory structure rising from a single central core in the same structural language as the Administration Building beside it, functioned as a working research laboratory for decades before safety-code changes eventually closed it to regular occupancy; it stands today as a National Historic Landmark, open to visitors on a tour basis but preserved rather than actively worked in, a middle case between the still-functioning office building next to it and the pure museum pieces elsewhere in Wright's catalog. Together the two buildings make the S. C. Johnson campus one of the few places anywhere that a visitor can see a major Wright commission that a company chose to keep using rather than hand over entirely to preservation, decades after the architect who designed it and the president who commissioned it were both gone.