I don’t believe, as many architects do, that the most powerful way to represent architecture is in film.  Then I stumbled across color newsreel footage of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin from its opening in 1939.  These brief passages were so stunning that I nearly fell off my seat.  We’re all familiar with photos of the building, but the film (which is similar in content, although not in spirit, to this black and white newsreel) brought it to life as photographs don’t and, perhaps, even a visit to the building, which still serves as the S. C. Johnson headquarters, wouldn’t.

The grainy clips, with washed-out hues that quiet the structure’s bright red brick, depict a mysterious, lyrically futuristic workspace.  Men in overcoats and hats and women in A-line skirts and pussy-bow blouses rush about with tremendous style and purpose.  And the building itself – the glass corridors, the arched passageways, the round elevators, and the famous lily-pad-columned main hall – seems majestic and slightly noirish.  It gives employees a magnificent stage-set for their everyday lives.