Driving around in Racine Wisconsin: commercialking

I was in Racine Wisconsin last week driving around looking at properties. A friend has a couple of single families up that way under contract and an apartment building she’s negotiating on that she wanted my opinion of. She asked if I’d come along to look at them and see what the rest of the area looks like (she’s pretty hot on Racine). So after we look at the apartment building we’re doing a typical drive around: one person driving, the other taking notes on board-ups, realtor signs, vacant buildings. We took a wrong turn and we were trying to find a way back when suddenly I said, “Wait a minute, that’s the Johnson Wax building!! We’ve gotta stop, I want to look at that.”

My friend was a bit confused about why I would be so excited about what appeared to her to be just another corporate campus and, I suppose, by now you may be as well.


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You see I live in Chicago and in Chicago, at least among some people, Architecture is close to a religious experience. We are every bit as enthusiastic about it as we are about music (the blues), or sports (the Cubs, etc.), or politics (his highness) or food (did you know they think is a sacrilege to put ketchup on a hot dog here?) .

So in Chicago we have Architecture Cults that form up around the Greats. Was Root a better designer than Sullivan? Can we tear down a building which has an interior stairway designed by Mies or does that one element by a Great make it a sacred space not to be disturbed (that was a real issue a couple of years ago)? Was Burnham's 1902 plan prescient or ignored? These arguments can get pretty intense.

But no cult is cult-ier than the Frank Lloyd Wright cult. To hear them tell it Mr. Wright never walked across Lake Michigan only because he was too busy changing water into wine. Interesting enough the Wright cult breaks down into two wings, the Chicago wing and the Wisconsin wing. The Chicago wing is based in Oak Park in Wright's house there which they have renovated into a museum. The Wisconsin wing is based in Spring Green where Wright had both a house and a school which they have also renovated into a museum. In between the two houses Wright ran off with a client's wife and toured Europe and came back with a different woman. Scandalous behavior in the 1900's and it hurt his career. These days it would have been a big boost. I know lots of guys who would hire an architect if they thought he would take the wife away at the end (and even more who feel that way about their wife by the end of the project).

So, anyway, I went through a Frank Lloyd Wright fan stage. I read everything, looked at the picture books, went on the pilgrimage to Oak Park and Spring Green, toured the Robbe house in Hyde Park, even did a little work on the Unitarian Church building. But as is my wont I began to be disillusioned with the Great.

It seemed that every Wright building that I looked at had some sort of major flaw. Frequently the flaw seemed to be that Wright was either not a very good engineer or skimped on materials or whatever but his buildings didn't hold up very well. A friend claims that the problem is that we've left them out in the weather for 100 years but isn't that what you are supposed to do with a building? And lots of other guys seem to be able to design buildings that don't have to be rebuilt every 100 years.

On the other hand I certainly recognized Wright's contributions to American architecture. He was among the first to show that a house could be more than a box that you plopped down where you wanted to live, that a building could be part of its environment, that there could be an intimate relationship between a natural world and the world of construction.

And about this time I met a fellow who was one of my personal Greats. John D. Cordwell.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/caohp/cordwell.html
http://www.larrysantoro.com/cordwell2.html.

John was an import to Chicago from England. But even though he had been here longer than I'd been alive he had lost none of his British accent or style.

John was also an architect. His firm here in Chicago was uniquely gifted at placing buildings in an urban environment so that they both related to it and transformed it (much as Wright had done with the natural environment). John's buildings were not necessarily great examples of architectural beauty but they were magnificent at being livable. And they transformed the neighborhoods where they were located into models of livable neighborhoods at a time when urban flight was making huge swaths of the city into wastelands.

But all of that (and many more Cordwell stories) was before I met him. By the time I met him John had retired to running the best English pub in Chicago where he would sit at the end of the bar and hold forth on Architecture, Urban Planning, World War II (he spent 3 years as a German POW after getting shot down one night over Belgium), and life in general for those smart enough to listen.

I remember one night a lad from the UIC's architecture department sitting at the other end of the bar spouting some nonsense he had learned in class. I went to John and said, “What’s up with him? All this stuff has nothing to do with the real world and hasn’t been true in 100 years. How come you are not setting him straight?” John just shook his head, "No point," he said, "that fellow has it so wrong you'd have to go back to kindergarten and start over." So this bright young lad wasted an evening being pompous and knowing the answers to everything while one of the true Greats in his field sat 30 feet away shaking his head and marveling at his stupidity.

So anyway I took a few days off about that time and drove up to Spring Green to look at Taliesin-- Wright's home and school in the rolling hills of Wisconsin where he had what was perhaps the most productive period of his career. While I was there I went to the House on the Rock, a vaudevillian abortion a few miles away that is Wisconsin's largest tourist attraction and I stopped in Madison and looked at the art museum and the state capital and various and other sights and sundries along the way. Nice little 3 or 4 day driving vacation. And I came back and was having a pint in the Lion when John wandered in and sat next to me.

As friends will he asked me what I had been up to and I told him I'd been off to visit Taliesin. "And what did you think?" he asked. Well I proceeded to explain that it seemed odd to me that every Wright building had some engineering flaw that I had been noticing and I know that he's a Great and all that but .. . . And I proceeded to tick off the list of Wright buildings and what I thought was wrong with each one and as I did so John would occasionally interject words of encouragement (his favorite was "fantastic" which he used to mean both unbelievable and wonderful at the same time) that I had done well to notice these things and that I had, indeed, properly understood the situations. "Of course" , I concluded, "I've never seen the Johnson Wax building and perhaps it will be perfect."

And John got the most amazing twinkle in his eye and a wonderful wry smile and he sort of tilted his head to one side and he held up one finger for dramatic effect and he paused and he said, "The roof leaks."

Now you have to understand about the roof at the Johnson Wax building. It is magnificent. It is held up by these amazingly graceful columns that are usually compared to lily pads. At the top they spread out to these concrete disks that hold up the ceiling which is made up of tubular glass skylights that even now, at least according to John they, cannot get to stop leaking.

http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/gbi.cgi/Johnson_Wax_Building.html/cid_johnson_wax_002.gbi
So all of this went through my mind in a flash as we drove down the street in Racine and I told my companion we had to stop and I had to look at these buildings up close and go see that ceiling if I could (which of course I couldn't because they don't allow tourists inside since 9/11 according to the guard) so that I could remember my friend John Cordwell the wise man and Frank Lloyd Wright the eccentric genius.

And I have been thinking about them ever since and I guess that's why I'm writing this article because I think I may finally understand some of what Cordwell told me that lovely spring day at the end of the bar at the Red Lion Inn all those years ago.

The reason all Wright's building have some major flaw is that he was always pushing the envelope; always doing something new; always doing something that couldn't quite be done with the technology and the resources available to do it. But Wright never let that stop him from doing something creative and new and innovative and magnificent. That is what makes him one of the Greats.

Most of us, however, are uncomfortable with the idea of greatness. We want a nice simple formula we can do over and over again and never have to worry about it going wrong. That's why so many people keep jobs they hate. At least they know they won't fail at them. Better safe mediocrity than greatness and the risk of failure.

Yet Wright seems to point to another possibility: the possibility of succeeding "good enough". A hundred years later people don't worry about the difficulty in keeping the studio at Taliesin warm in the winter or the leaking roof at the Johnson Wax building or that Falling Water cost several times more to rebuild than it did to build it in the first place (even allowing for inflation) instead they are willing to absorb those difficulties for the pleasure of the things Wright succeeded at - design that integrates building and landscape in ways that are fun and intimate and human-- and for living in the presence of Greatness.

When you begin to work the real estate investment business this is the hardest part. You are setting yourself apart from the mediocre. By the very act of attempting to break out of the mold of mediocrity you will be a challenge to your friends and family who are have opted for the average. And they will, for the most part, take it as their first duty to talk you out of this crazy idea that includes the possibility of failure.

So I guess the point here is to encourage you to push the envelope, to strive for Greatness. To be willing to take the jibes of friends and family who will tell you it cannot be done, that you cannot be a real estate investor, that you don't have the time or the money or the technology or the resources. To which I think Mr. Wright would respond, “Of course you don't. You never do. But we are going to do it anyway.”

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