Science: Usonian Architect

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The Johnson Administration Building has been built like an expensive watch on what Architect Wright calls a "unit plan," everything fitting into a horizontal scheme of 20-ft. squares, a vertical scheme of 3½- in. brick units. The Johnson Building is the first sizable structure Wright has had a chance to build since the Imperial Hotel, and it ranks with that masterpiece as an engineering feat. Wright's plans for it set the Wisconsin State Industrial Commission on its ear. The columns by which the architect proposed to support his building were neither pillars nor posts but tall stem forms, tapering from a concrete disk 20 ft. in diameter at the top to a base 8 in. thick at the floor. By ordinary reckoning, these slenderizing pencils would take about two tons weight each where they were called on to support twelve. In an official test the column held up 60 tons.

These "dendriform" columns, growing from the floor and increasing the spaciousness of the floor level, were made possible by a distribution of stresses through concrete reinforced by welded steel mesh. The huge main room is lit not by windows but by a wide horizontal rift of glass tubing at the angle of walls and ceiling and by skylights. It is ventilated through two circular ducts or "nostrils" rising through the building. Radiators have been eliminated by a heating system under the floor slabs. Clients. The history of the Johnson Building illustrates perfectly one of the traits in Frank Lloyd Wright which lesser architects have played against him for all it is worth. The architect's original estimate of its cost was $250,000. By mutual agreement this was later raised to $350,000. It is now apparent that the final cost of the building will be nearer $450.000. This sort of thing has happened often in Wright's career, and the hostile argument runs that few businessmen are as able as rich Mr. Johnson to stand the gaff of perfectionism at like cost.

Against this argument the fact stands that, out of more than 150 clients, only three or four have been seriously dissatisfied over money or anything else. Both in the early Oak Park period and later, Wright has in general attracted clients who had enough money to be adventurous but not enough to be stuffy. His personal improvidence is legendary. But the best piece of evidence that Wright will, when really necessary, pay careful heed to the means of his client is the one-story, six-room, $5,500 house which he finished last month for Herbert Jacobs, a newspaperman in Madison, Wis.

Usonia is Frank Lloyd Wright's name for the U. S. A. He found it in Samuel Butler and, eclectic for once, appropriated it because he liked it. It is one of the tricks of speech and thought by which Wright links a curiously old-fashioned Americanism to an Americanism which is still ahead of his time. The Jacobs house he calls a Usonian house and it is his exhibit A in a demonstration of what Usonia might be. It "may help to indicate," he says, "how stifling the little colonial hot-boxes, whether hallowed by government or not, really are where Usonian family life is concerned."