Price Tower: The Tree That Escaped the Crowded Forest

Rising nineteen stories above the flat streets of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, stands a building that Frank Lloyd Wright himself called the tree that escaped the crowded forest. Price Tower is the only skyscraper Wright ever designed that was actually built, and it remains one of the most important works of architecture on American soil.

Wright had conceived the essential idea as far back as nineteen twenty-eight, in an unbuilt proposal for a residential tower on Saint Mark's in the Bowery in New York City. The design called for a single reinforced concrete core from which all floors would cantilever outward, like the branches of a tree from its trunk. Manhattan never built it. Oklahoma did.

Harold C. Price, owner of a local oil pipeline and chemical firm, hired Wright to design a headquarters building in the early nineteen fifties. Construction began in nineteen fifty-three, and the tower was completed and dedicated in February of nineteen fifty-six. More than twelve thousand five hundred of Bartlesville's roughly seventeen thousand five hundred residents came through to see it on opening day, a remarkable figure for a single building in a small oil-field city.

The design was organic in Wright's full sense of the word. The nineteen-story structure has no conventional steel frame. Instead, four tapering pylons anchor the concrete core, and each floor plate reaches outward without additional columns. The exterior uses copper louvers, glass, and concrete in a pattern that shifts as you walk around the building, each face appearing different. Wright rotated the floor plan forty-five degrees from the street grid, giving the tower a slightly diagonal presence on its corner lot.

Price Tower was declared a National Historic Landmark in two thousand seven. It operated for years as an arts center and boutique hotel. New ownership in recent years has announced plans for its ongoing restoration and use. In a state whose architecture tends toward the utilitarian, Price Tower is a singularity, standing proof that Wright's most radical structural idea found its home not in Manhattan, but here.