Price Tower

I was being in Tulsa.

I took a trip to Bartlesville to go see Price Tower.

Have any of you had the opportunity to walk Price Tower to see it? No, but I'd love to.

Okay.

So loved it.

Price commits to the project and more importantly, largely lets Wright build what Wright wants to build, a freedom the architect rarely enjoys with corporate clients and one he clearly relishes.

The Price Tower rises between 1952 and 1956, its copper-clad walls oxidizing over time to a green patina, its floors arranged around that central core in a pattern Wright calls a tree that escaped the crowded forest, a description that captures both his genuine affection for the building and his lifelong instinct to describe his architecture in terms borrowed from the natural world.

The tower includes both offices and residential apartments, an unusual mixture for the period, and Wright designs custom furniture for its interiors, as he so often does.

Chairs and desks and even wastebaskets conceived as extensions of the architecture rather than furnishings added afterward.

When it opens, Price Tower stands as the only skyscraper Wright will ever see built to completion in his lifetime, a fact that carries a certain irony given how many towers he had imagined on paper across sixty years of practice.

He is photographed standing at its base looking up, and in the image there is something almost boyish in his posture.

A man in his mid-eighties who has just proven to himself, if to no one else, that he could still do the thing he had wanted to do since he was young.

It's a different idea.

And while you were talking about the, the old professor, I was thinking about, I told you I went and toured, uh, Price Tower.

Frank Lloyd Wright revered royalty.

I'm not crazy about his work, to be perfectly honest with you, from a functional standpoint.

too.

Both the mural there and then with Price Tower in the background, it really is a beautiful photo.

It's a great location.

And so if folks can't find it, they've got troubles, huh? Yes.

No, please.

But it's great.

And it's always wonderful to have you guys come in here at the first month and visit with us and remind everybody that you're right downtown, home of the mural, right down there by the RSU and Price Tower and everything.

But it's what's inside that counts.

beautiful.

I don't know what the status is on the Price Tower.

In process is the last I heard.

Whenever

I know there were spooky things in Bartlesville.

The Price Tower, which was designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was also purported to be spooky.

But again, new or different fancy building in the middle of a small town, like, You know, you get anything with art deco architecture and people are like, it's haunted.

But it was a beautiful building.