What it’s like to work in the world’s greatest office

Source: What it’s like to work in the world’s greatest office, Vox, 13:37, uploaded 2022-09-28, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1687.

Phil Edwards enters Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, with a simple plan. He wants to work there. The building opened in 1939, when offices were often private rooms or cramped spaces, and its Great Workroom offered a spacious shared room meant to let ideas travel between employees. Wright designed it as a place that could inspire people as strongly as a cathedral inspires worshippers.

Edwards has worked remotely for four years. His coworkers appear as names that he clicks, and his home office sits beside a child’s Pack ’N Play. The famous building promises a different form of work. Edwards wants to find out whether the architecture can still produce that feeling when a visitor arrives with a laptop and no ordinary office to join.

The Great Workroom and the space between compression and expansion

The Great Workroom’s columns give the room its first shock. Jonathan Lipman, the architect and author who wrote about the SC Johnson headquarters, describes the common response as a feeling of being underwater, perhaps inside a lily pond. The columns rise like stalks and spread into wide forms beneath the roof. Wright called them dendriform columns because their shape recalls a tree. Each one has a calyx, stem, and petal.

The measurements make the design feel precarious. A column reaches 18.5 feet at its petal and measures only nine inches across at its base. Wright and SC Johnson had to prove that the structure could bear its load by piling rocks onto a test column. They reached 60 tons before stopping. The test is part of the room’s history because the visual lightness depends on a great deal of hidden confidence.

Lipman explains the room through a principle that runs through Wright’s work: compression and expansion. A person moves through a tight entrance and then arrives in a large open space. The SC Johnson building begins with a carport and a compressed passage. The lobby then opens into the Great Workroom, where the columns make the expansion visible. The room feels large because the building has controlled the route into it.

Edwards tries to prepare himself for the visit from a hotel room. He calls his editor, Bridgett, from the airport and jokes about their remote workflow. They do not share a Google Doc. They rely on one-to-one calls, even though his phone overheats in the Wisconsin summer before the conversation can finish. Bridgett gives him the obvious instruction: he should sit down and work in the room.

The Hardy House as a smaller rehearsal

Before Edwards reaches SC Johnson, he meets Mark Hertzberg, a photojournalist, Wright specialist, and author who has spent years documenting the Hardy House. Wright designed the house before the SC Johnson headquarters, and it carries the same spatial logic at a domestic scale.

The Hardy House begins with a narrow hall that opens into a living room and a view of the lake. Hertzberg points out how one door frame lines up with another across the balcony, whilst wood trim in the living room frames the view again. The house makes its occupants move through a sequence of compressed and expanded spaces. Wright also built furniture into the architecture. In the south bedrooms, chairs pull out from the wall for Anne Ruetz, who lived there as a child.

Hertzberg has already sat at a desk in the Great Workroom. He describes the privilege of spending time there with no camera, carrying only a laptop and looking around. The building changes when the visit becomes an act of attention rather than a photographic assignment. His account gives Edwards a test for the trip. The room has to work as a place where a person spends time, rather than as a set of images that look impressive from the outside.

A showpiece with leaks, unstable chairs, and too little light

SC Johnson’s archivist, Terri Boessl, leads Edwards through the building. The research tower opened in 1950, whilst the Great Workroom belongs to the original headquarters. Company leadership wanted a building that could inspire employees in the middle of an industrial city. The building’s status as a corporate showpiece therefore belonged to the work culture SC Johnson wanted to create, rather than to architecture alone.

The room’s openness made that culture visible. Employees gathered in one space without walls, and managers sat on a mezzanine above them. The arrangement kept different levels of the company within sight of one another. The design also carried ordinary failures. Wright’s elegant three-legged chairs tipped when workers leaned or reached for something. Leaks led to a “bucket brigade” in which people placed a bucket beneath the spot where water came through the roof. Pieces of the Pyrex tubing in the ceiling fell down.

The lighting needed repair as well. The building did not provide enough natural light, so SC Johnson added artificial lighting above and at the desks. Wright disliked the extra lights. The custom desks remain more successful. A drawer pulls out far enough to reveal its whole contents, so a worker can see everything at once instead of reaching into the back of a shallow compartment.

Edwards sees spiral staircases, the gold elevator, the columns, and the desks through a visitor’s lanyard. When he shows the room to his editor, Bridgett says that one camera angle makes it look like a very good hotel lobby. The remark punctures the building’s mystique for a moment. The room can become a background even before Edwards tests it as a workplace.

The laptop test

Edwards finally sits at one of the desks and gives himself half an hour to work. The experiment collapses into a familiar action. He is still sitting at a laptop, just as he would at home or in a coffee shop. The dendriform columns surround him, the ceiling admits light, and Wright’s furniture gives the desk a particular shape. The act of typing remains the act of typing.

That failure changes the question. The Great Workroom was built when a corporate headquarters with a grand shared room could represent the future. Edwards connects it to the corporate campuses that followed, including the campuses built by Google, Meta, and Amazon. Their offices owe something to the idea that work should happen in a designed social world rather than in a row of private rooms.

In 2022, Edwards can sit in the room and video-call people across the world with a few clicks. The technology creates distance and connection at once. He can speak to distant coworkers whilst remaining physically alone in the building that was meant to gather employees together. He asks whether this is compression or expansion, although the architectural terms no longer settle the experience.

The room would matter if the people and the energy of their shared work were present. Edwards has arrived with the visible structure of an office and the social life stripped away. Without that life, the Great Workroom becomes a background. The building’s design can shape attention and movement, although it cannot supply the human activity that made the original office feel like an office.

Limits

The source is an experiential video essay about architecture and work. Its historical details come through Edwards, Lipman, Hertzberg, Boessl, the SC Johnson archive, and the books named in the description. The captions provide no independent verification for the 60-ton column test, the workplace arrangements, or the history of the building. The note keeps those details attached to the source rather than treating the video as a complete history of Wright, SC Johnson, or corporate office design.

The final claim also depends on a deliberately thin experiment. Edwards works alone at a laptop for a short time, so the visit cannot reproduce an ordinary day in the Great Workroom. The result still answers the opening question at the level the video can support. The room remains a remarkable piece of design, whilst the feeling of working there depends on the people who occupy it.

Further reading / references

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Buildings, Jonathan Lipman’s book about the SC Johnson headquarters, described in the video’s source list as a comprehensive history of the building.
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hardy House, Mark Hertzberg’s book about the house and his years photographing it.
• SC Johnson tours and films, the company’s information about tours of the Administrative Building and Wingspread.