 he Johnson Wax Building in the 1930s is the natural compliment to the Larkin Building of the early century. And the differences are really very important. Let’s say the similarities first, though. In both you go in at the side into a low, dark place and come up into a high, transcendent space. That’s the Wrightian journey that you take in all his great buildings. But the Larkin building is all hard edges, blocky...it really is a kind of embodiment of...paternalistic capitalism.
Individual paternal capitalism... The Johnson Wax Building is all rounded surfaces. It pulls you in as if it were Scylla or Charybdis pulling you into a... pool and you go in and then those lily pad columns which again you see evoke the pool. When you go in, they’re just barely above your head, so you drown, and then you come up and you float under them in the great space... He wants it to look as if you’re in a pool, as if you’re under water, in a rounded surface. You couldn’t get closer to the womb, you couldn’t get closer to floating, floating in fluid, under water.
|
