Johnson Wax Pavilion
The pavilion featured an enormous gold disk that seemed to float 24 feet above the ground and was supported by surrounding columns. It housed a 500 seat theater that showed a three screen, 18 minute documentary movie "To Be Alive" that dramatized the theme of brotherhood. It was a sensitive, innovative and remarkable movie produced by Francis Thompson and it won many awards including an Academy Award. It showed people's daily lives from around the world as they grow up, fall in love, play and grow old. It demonstrated that "men everywhere share at the deepest level the same drives, dreams, foibles." Everyone, who attended the fair, heard about it and it drew long lines.
| The Johnson Wax Pavilion's huge column supported a 500 seat theater housed in a great gold colored disk. |
The Johnson Wax pavilion also an exhibition area at the ground level. It offered a climbing contraption for children, a home care information center and a shoeshine center that provided free shines. On the ground floor was a display which showed the wide range of materials man has used as floors from marble to teakwood.