FLW by Gill

To this day in Spring Green one hears stories not of Wright’s greatness but of his purported fiscal skuldug-
gery. lf the Wrights’ attitude toward money was a notable aberration in
the Oak Park of the nineties, so was their profligacy in respect to childbear-
ing, Few of the ambitious young couples in that community were hurling
child after child into the world; the white Protestant upper-middle-class
world had achieved a few more or less successful methods of birth control
by that time and six or more children were beginning to be regarded as
evidence of a deplorable carelessness, not to say lubricity.

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Meanwhile, furniture for the Administration Building was being con-
structed according to Wright’s designs. As he had done in the case of the
Larkin building, Wright had persuaded Johnson that the building and its
contents must be seen to be of one nature. The furniture that he designed,
mostly of metal, shared the same streamlining as the building: desks and
chairs were either rounded or curved and in their emphasis upon horizontal-
ity somewhat resembled the biplanes and triplanes designed by aeronautical
engineers early in the century—heavy as the furniture might be, one sus-
pected it of being capable of flight. Despite much advice to the contrary
Wright insisted ondesigning a chair with three legs, remarkable for its
instability. With his usual gift for employing any argument, however implau-
sible, in order to have his way, Wright claimed that the chair would improve
the alertness and efficiency of the employees by forcing them to adopt a
correct posture in order not to tip over. The chair having spilled enough
people unceremoniously onto the floor (Wright himself is said to have
been one of them), he was at last obliged to approve the design of a
comparatively normal four-legged chair.
The Administration Building officially opened in May 1939 after
almost three years of construction and at a cost approaching three million
dollars. Neither time nor money mattered—the building was an instanta-
neous triumph, both with the executives and employees of the company
and with the world at large. To this day, it gives delight and no amount
of criticism, whether of its oddity in aesthetic terms or its elitism in philosoph-
ical terms, is likely to diminish that delight. As far as I know, few writers
have concerned themselves with the question of Wright’s sudden and unex-
pected espousal of streamlining, which he carried to such extraordinary
lengths in the Administration Building and, later, in the Research Tower.
(In the Capital’ journal project, upon which the Administration Building
was based, the shell of the building was severely rectilinear.)
Streamlining was known to be of practical value in the design of automo-
biles, airplanes, and trains, but in the nineteen thirties it became the fashion
to design stationary objects whether large or small (refrigerators, furnaces
electric toasters, and even pencil sharpeners) with so-called aerodynamic
contours; the fashion spread to architecture, colliding with the weaponlike
Zigzags of Art Deco and sometimes marrying them. But what has streamlin-
ing to do with architecture except as an expression of meretricious faddish-
negss? The Administration Building wasn’t going anywhere and had no
need for reduced wind resistance; in its relentless multiplicity of suave
roundnesses, it embodied some playful whim in Wright’s unconcious-
one that was wholly at odds with the no less playful whim that led to the
vivid angularities of Fallingwater, designed at precise the same time.
is tempting to find a clue to Wright’s streamlining of the ]ohnson Wax
building in the fact that Hib Johnson and he, both devotees of fine cars
owned Lincoln Zephyrs, which have entered ‘history as among
handsome streamlined cars ever designed. Wright claimed, without adduc-
ing proof ilhat he was the first to apply the term “streamlining” to build-
ings—the,first use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
goes back to the early years of the present century—and he certainly took
pride in the virtuosity with which he manipulated it. He was delighted
when Life magazine described the interior of the building as “like a woman
swimming naked in a stream”