Alumni

Wright in Racine:
The Architect’s Vision for One American City

More books have been written about Frank Lloyd Wright than about any other architect, but the old man’s accomplishments were so impressively manifold that there is always room for another well-produced study, and Mark S. Hertzberg ’72 has provided one. The title, Wright in Racine: The Architect’s Vision for One American City, is likely to attract anyone who has visited the spectacular buildings Wright designed for the S. C. Johnson Company in this Wisconsin harbor town on the shores of Lake Michigan. 

But there are more Wright buildings and projects of consequence in Racine, and Hertzberg has turned up new and vital information about all of them. Why did the commission for the Johnson Administration Building, by consensus one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century, very nearly go to another architect? Why did Wright, who freely confessed his arrogance and pursuit of power, willingly base his design of Wingspread, the Johnson family home, on a sketch by the company’s architecturally untrained chairman? Why did Wright’s elegant design for the Racine YMCA never materialize? The answers are here, presented clearly and concisely, accompanied by some of the best color photographs of Wright’s work that have ever been published.

The photos were shot by Hertzberg himself, and that should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the history of Lake Forest College, Thirty Miles North, where several of his images appear. Hertzberg was one of the campus photographers put to work by the legendary director of public information, Ellen Mosey, one of the three people to whom Hertzberg dedicates his own book.

Hertzberg’s Wright connection has been an outgrowth of his current position as director of photography at the Racine Journal Times, and of the fascination a gifted Lake Forest alumnus has found over the years in Racine’s remarkable architectural heritage.

Review by Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus, Franz Schulze. The first revised version of his 1985 biography of Meis Van der Rohe is due to be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

By Mark S. Hertzberg ’72
Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2004