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Racine, Wisconsin
Well I've been waking up at sunrise, I've been following the light across my room, I watch the night receive the room of my day
Twenty miles south of Milwaukee along the vain and boastful lake is the especially uninteresting town of Racine, known only for its damn tasty kringles and this, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed headquarters of the SC Johnson Wax Company, the home of Raid, Ziploc and those pesky scrubbing bubbles, among other popular household products.
This specifically is from the outside looking in, with the Golden Rondelle Theater (designed by the derivative hack architects at the Taliesin Fellowship) on the left and the world's highest cantilever tower off in the distance (all photography was strictly prohibited once inside the gates). An interesting note about the world's tallest cantilever tower: as a true cantilever it has only one central vertical support with one stair and one means of egress. With only one means of egress it is considered highly unsafe and hence unoccupiable by the City of Racine. So the world's highest cantilever tower, a true icon of Modern Architecture (originally designed by Wright for research) is used only for storage above its second floor.
The entrance to (or, more accurately, the exit from) the leaky workroom at Johnson Wax, where all photography remains strictly prohibited. Like all Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, its owners ignore the little things to revel in its greatness. It has been under constant renovation since opening over 60 years ago, its ceiling has been completely replaced, its skylights replaced with a solid roof and halogen lights, its custom chairs replaced with comfortable and stable off-the-shelf chairs, ugly filing cabinets and perimeter private offices added, its custom glass tubes all replaced with plexiglas tubes, all the while its workers remain helplessly subject to the stares of groups of strangers from all over the world sneaking pictures at 11am, 1pm and 3pm every Friday.
Home to the National League's own Milwaukee Brewers, Miller Park is without question the nicest retractable dome stadium yet to be built. This is two views, from the front and back, of an open roof on a terribly hot and humid Friday night.
In the sixth inning fans tear themselves away from the constant barrage of Miller products and a relatively good 10-4 game between the Brewers and Rockies to watch a Bratwurst Race. Yes, a Bratwurst Race. The one in the blue hat in front is the original bratwurst (he lost), followed closely by the hot dog (he lost), then the German sausage (he lost) and finally the Italian sausage (he won). From my damn fine fifth row left field seats you could feel the excitement in the crowd as they either wildly cheered or gasped in horror as the giant bratwursts raced around the warning track. Equally disturbing was the mascot and the sliding board in left field and the otherworldly and almost existential "rally rabbit," all of which seemed perfectly normal to local Brewers fans, or, more accurately, perfectly normal to those Brewers fans who were close to meeting their quotas of consuming those ever present, fine Miller products.
A twenty minute train ride west of downtown Chicago on the faithless green line, Oak Park was my Chicagoland home for two days as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's for twenty years (or so). In many ways, Unity Temple proved his ticket out of Oak Park and back to Wisconsin. An amazing, revolutionary truly modern building that just doesn't photograph well, it is something that I would highly recommend to anyone, unless of course you intend to visit it in the midst of a mid-summer heat wave. Roughly the proportions of an oven with thick, reinforced concrete insulating walls and absolutely no cooling system, the building was truly hotter than I imagine hell itself to be.
If you hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design your Unitarian Temple back in 1906, you would have been surprised what you ended up with from the local, Unitarian architect. Compared to more traditional architects, his residential work of prairie style, arts and crafts houses certainly was experimental, but nothing like this. This is all concrete, an amazingly compact cube of wonderfully compressive and expansive spaces, all softened with the usually modern art glass and custom light fixtures.
If you've had enough of that damn Frank Lloyd Wright, of his damn Unity Temple, of all these damn architect pictures then you're almost in luck. This is the last of the scheduled Unity Temple pictures, a wonderfully dark and moody picture of the concrete columns and the art glass clerestory windows.
Another dark and moody shot of another dark and moody Wright building, this one his actual house in southern Wisconsin, Taliesin. Clearly without question the weakest of all of the Wright buildings I have ever visited, it proved that lots of interesting enough spaces shoved together can still equal one mess of a house.
