S. C. Johnson and Son

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

S. C. Johnson and Son began as a sideline. Samuel Curtis Johnson bought a parquet flooring business in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1886, and the wood-finishing wax he sold as a complement to the flooring, so customers could maintain the floors he had just laid, turned out to be the more durable product. What is unusual about the company that grew from that sideline is not its size, though it is among the largest privately held companies in the United States, but its persistence in the hands of one family across five generations, at a moment when almost every comparably sized American manufacturer from the same era has long since gone public, been acquired, or dissolved. Herbert F. Johnson Jr., the founder's grandson, took over as president in 1928 at twenty-eight, on his father's sudden death, and ran the company for exactly half a century until 1978, presiding over its two famous architectural commissions and building an early and unusually generous employee benefits program: a pension plan in 1934, an employee resort in 1951, comprehensive medical insurance in 1961, and a standing commitment from 1937 onward of five percent of pretax profits to charitable giving. The company that resulted is a genuine rarity in American business history: a household name, present in most American homes through brands most people could not necessarily connect to a parent company, still governed by the family whose name is on the door, still headquartered in the small Wisconsin city where it started, and still declining, across five generations of pressure to do otherwise, to sell any part of itself to outside shareholders.

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.