© Mark Hertzberg (2024)
The future of Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma is uncertain. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy has initiated legal proceedings against Cynthia Blanchard, the owner of the building, over her sale of Wright artifacts from the building, including one of the office chairs Wright designed, to a mid-century design dealer in Dallas. The Building Conservancy has an easement on the property, which, it says, prohibits the sale of any of the artifacts.
Wright designed the tower in 1952 as a combination office and apartment building, and it opened in 1956. The exterior and two-story pinwheel floor plan are derived from Wright’s unrealized design for the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery apartment buildings in New York City (1927-1929).*
The Inn at Price Tower hotel opened in 2003. Blanchard said in a television interview that it was no longer profitable to operate the hotel and its Copper Bar and Restaurant. She announced the closure August 9. Hotel and restaurant employees were laid off and tenants of the building were given notice to move out within 30 days. She said in an interview that the closure is not necessarily permanent, and that she hopes to find a buyer for the building which, she says, is no longer profitable for her to operate.
The photographs are from our stay at the hotel in April 2011. Scott Perkins, who was the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions and at the Price Tower Arts Center, was our host, graciously allowed me to photograph every nook and cranny of the building (he is now Fallingwater’s senior Director of Preservation and Collections).
This photograph and the one below were taken looking up on the external staircase.
Price Tower reflected in a nearby building
The living room of one of the original apartments
The sitting room on the lower floor of one of the two-story hotel rooms
One can only hope that my sunset photo of Price Tower was not a harbinger of things to come.
*While Price Tower was designed around Wright’s idea of a taproot tower, the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer told me that it is not a taproot tower because it is tied into the foundation of the adjoining two-story office building. He told me that the SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine is Wright’s only realized taproot tower.
Author’s note: Thank you to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy for their attention to the tower, and to the Building Conservancy’s John Waters for his editing notes on this article.
Please scroll down for previous posts on this site.
Links:
Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy coverage:
https://savewright.org/endangered-price-tower-in-bartlesville-oklahoma/
Local television coverage:
Wright in Racine 