Content area
Full Text
To the art historians, it is a masterpiece. The sleek, three-story building, designed down to the doorknobs by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has been described not only as this country's "greatest piece of 20th century architecture" but "possibly the most profound work of art that America has ever produced."
Then again, the historians never worked there.
But for the 160 employees at S.C. Johnson & Son Inc.'s headquarters, each day is, in the words of Judy McCrickard, "truly a special experience."
There is the ever-shifting play of light and shadows. There are also the mice that get trapped in some of the glass tubes that replace conventional windows.
There is the half-acre "Great Workroom," with its three-story skylighted ceiling and 60 mushroom-shaped support columns. And there are the five-gallon buckets brought out during thunderstorms to catch the leaks.
There is the overall sense of spaciousness and grandeur in a building where, McCrickard says, "my spirit starts to soar." And then there are the thousands of curious architecture aficionados who traipse through every year.
It all underscores the joys and challenges of working in the bustling center of a $4 billion-a-year consumer-products company that also happens to be an aging national treasure. The building, commissioned during the Depression by then-Chairman H.F. Johnson Jr., helped revivethe floundering career of Wright, a brilliant but arrogant architect.
But the headquarters, with its glass and brick, and its flat roof, wasn't designed with maintenance in mind. "It's a balancing act every day to protect the integrity of such an architectural masterpiece and yet have it be a functional office building,"...