This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The best-known story about Herbert F. Johnson Jr. and Frank Lloyd Wright is not about the Administration Building at all, but about its roof, and it captures the whole shape of a client-architect relationship that lasted for decades across three separate commissions. Johnson hired Wright three times: for the company's Administration Building (1936 to 1939), its Research Tower (1947 to 1950), and Johnson's own home, Wingspread, in Wind Point, Wisconsin, finished in 1939. The Administration Building was famous immediately for its innovation, most visibly its glass-tube skylights, tens of thousands of Pyrex tubes forming a translucent, glowing ceiling unlike anything in American commercial architecture at the time. It was also, for years, famous for leaking. The tubes that let in light let in water too, and the building's roof problems became a running theme in the Johnson family's dealings with their architect, never fully solved to anyone's satisfaction during Wright's lifetime. The moment that has stuck in the company's own institutional memory happened at Wingspread, not the Administration Building: during a dinner party, a leak in the roof poured water directly onto Johnson's head at the table, in front of his guests. Johnson picked up the phone, called Wright in Phoenix, and complained. Wright's reply, delivered loudly enough that the whole table reportedly heard it, was to tell him: well, Hib, why don't you move your chair. It is a small story, almost a joke, but it says something true about why the relationship survived leaks, cost overruns that ran the Administration Building's budget from roughly two hundred thousand dollars to half a million, and Wright's famous unwillingness to apologize for anything. Johnson kept commissioning him anyway, three times over fourteen years, because he wanted what Wright alone was offering: buildings that made his small Midwestern wax company look, and feel, like it belonged in the century it was trying to lead.