Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower was his pioneering experiment in the multi-use skyscraper: a tall, slim, richly detailed structure whose purpose was to combine business offices, retail and apartments. It is located about 60 miles north of Tulsa Oklahoma and is worth a visit by any member of the ARTKABINETT art collectors social network. The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price in 1955, for use as a corporate headquarters for his Bartlesville company. His wife, Mary Lou Patteson Price, and his two sons, Harold, Jr., and Joe, rounded out the building committee.
The Prices were directed to Frank Lloyd Wright by architect Bruce Goff, who was then Dean of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, where the Price sons had studied.
The H. C. Price Company was the primary tenant, and the remaining office floors and double-height apartments intended as income-raising ventures. Tenants included lawyers, accountants, physicians, dentists, insurance agents, and the architect Bruce Goff, who kept an office in the tower as well as rented one of the apartments.
A women's high-end dress shop, beauty salon, and the regional offices of the Public Service Company of Oklahoma occupied a two-story wing of the tower, with a drive-through passageway separating the high and low structures. The Price Company occupied the upper floors, and included a commissary on the sixteenth floor as well as a penthouse office suite for Harold Price, Sr., and later his son, Harold, Jr.
That relationship bonded into a life-long patronage of both architects by the Price Family. Wright designed an Arizona home for the senior Prices and a Bartlesville home for Harold, Jr., his wife Carolyn Propps Price, and their six children.
Goff, who was also a tenant at Price Tower, became the favored architect of Joe Price, designing a bachelor studio on his family's property in Bartlesville and two later additions following his marriage to Etsuko Yoshimochi.
The Tower isn't just a beautiful building. It is also an astounding architectural and engineering achievement. Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas on urban planning were based on a central tower that could be built just about anywhere, regardless of weather or terrain, to "seed" the development of urban communities across a nation that was still in the early 20th century relatively underdeveloped.
How it Works
Wright, more than other architects of his time, explored the engineering technique known as "cantilevering," in which great sections of a building can be suspended without supporting columns or pillars around the sides.
Conventional buildings had strong columns or walls distributed around the outside of the structure and throughout the interior. The columns or walls supported the floors. The large amount of materials required to support the weight of a tall building using this construction method placed a limitation on safe building height.
In Wright's design for a tower, he combined cantilevered floors with what is called "taproot" design. Borrowing from nature, Wright understood that a building's floors and outer walls could be held aloft in the same way that a tree raises it branches and leaves - with a trunk-anchored in place by a deep, central foundation, or "taproot". Price referred to the structure, as "a tree which escaped a crowded forest".
The tower's trunk consists of an inner concrete and steel core - actually four of them - that also serve as the elevator shafts. Cantilevered out from this central core are the tower's 19 floors.
Today, Price Tower Arts Center continues to follow Wright's original design intent by offering a variety of opportunities for guests to learn from and interact with one of the master's greatest achievements.
In 2006, architecture and design enthusiasts from across the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of the completion of Wright's only skyscraper and in 2007 the Price Tower was named a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
Price Tower Arts Center's rapidly growing architecture and design collections number almost 3,000 objects mainly concentrated in two areas: works by Frank Lloyd Wright and his firm and material by architect Bruce Goff. Concerning the former, significant pieces range from the Prairie Style to his late modernism include furniture, textiles, and documents.
The latter group of Goff material-second only to those of the Art Institute of Chicago - includes architectural fragments, over 200 renderings (line drawings, original drawings and presentation drawings), paintings, and personal effects.
Important supporting collections of archival material include original correspondence from Wright, contemporary film and photography documenting the construction of Price Tower and related Price Company material. There are also examples by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Werner Panton, and Zaha Hadid, among others.
The Arts Center's exhibition program has also allowed it to begin developing a dynamic collection of contemporary art which aligns with the museum's mission to explore the intersection of art, architecture, and design, such as the monumental sculpture Sixty-Six (2004) by Robert Indiana and numerous pieces by Dennis Oppenheim.
Bartlesville is home to significant buildings by Welton Becket, Edward Buehler Delk, John Duncan Forsyth, Bruce Goff, HOK (Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum), Clifford May, and Frank Lloyd Wright, forming an impressive survey of aspects of 20th-century American architecture.
Contemporary design has not been neglected, with Price Tower Arts Center’s commissions from Wendy Evans Joseph and Zaha Hadid. The works of these architects, added to the Arts Center’s collections and its Architecture Study Center will provide an unparalleled architectural destination.
It will be a vibrant “center for studies in American architecture in the American heartland” (Dean Frederick Steiner, University of Texas). Neighboring Tulsa also enjoys a rich architectural legacy, with spectacularly preserved Art Deco structures that attest to the Oil Boom of the 1920s and 1930s.
In Tulsa, Frank Lloyd Wright designed Westhope (1929) for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, a local newspaper magnate. It is Wright’s only textile block house outside California. Nowadays, in keeping with Wright's original mixed-use intent, the Tower Inn offers visitors beautiful hotel accommodations, private residences, and fine dining.
Definitely worth a visit, if you are anywhere near Tulsa, Oklahoma
Price Tower Arts Center
510 Dewey Avenue
Bartlesville, Oklahoma, U.S.
phone: 001. 918.336.4949
