Price Tower
The Price Tower is a nineteen-story, skyscraper at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States. One of the few high-rises designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Price Tower is derived from a 1929 proposal for a group of apartment buildings in New York City. Harold C. Price Sr., the head of the pipeline-construction firm H. C. Price Company, commissioned the tower. The building was widely discussed when it was completed in 1956. It received the American Institute of Architects' Twenty-five Year Award in 1983 and has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
The H. C. Price Company wanted to develop a modern headquarters in Bartlesville, and Harold Price hired Wright to design it in 1952. Groundbreaking took place on November 13, 1953, with a topping out ceremony in March 1955. The Price Tower opened on February 10, 1956, attracting thousands of sightseers. The Price Company sold the tower in 1981 to Phillips Petroleum, which occupied the tower's offices until the mid-1980s. Phillips donated the structure to the Price Tower Arts Center in 2001. The arts center subsequently converted part of the building into a museum, opening a boutique hotel and restaurant on the upper stories. The Price Tower was sold in 2023 and closed in 2024 following financial issues and legal disputes. It was resold in 2025 to McFarlin Building LLC, which began renovating it into a hotel and residential building that year
As built, the Price Tower had about of rentable space, split across one residential and three office quadrants. The floor plan is laid out on a grid of parallelograms with 30-60-90 triangles, arranged around a pinwheel-shaped structural core with four piers. The facade includes embossed copper spandrels and louvers, tinted glass windows, and poured stucco surfaces. The reinforced-concrete floors are cantilevered outward from the structural core. Initially, the residential and office portions of the building were accessed by different lobbies and elevators. The top three stories originally functioned as a penthouse apartment and office for the Price family. Although the exterior has remained intact over the years, the interiors have been converted to various uses.
Site
The Price Tower is at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, in Washington County in northeastern Oklahoma, approximately north of Tulsa. It is on a city block bounded by the now-closed Silas Street to the south, Dewey Avenue to the west, Fifth Street to the north, and Osage Avenue to the east. The tower's base occupies two land lots measuring a combined.The rest of the block includes a storage annex, which was originally used as a grocery store and car dealership, as well as a parking lot. The Tower Center at Unity Square, a green space and park immediately south of the Price Tower, links the tower with the Bartlesville Community Center. Work on the park began in March 2019, and it opened in May 2020.
History
Development
Bartlesville, a small city in northeastern Oklahoma, had become economically prosperous in the late 19th and 20th centuries due to the success of the local oil industry. Oil magnates in Bartlesville commissioned architects to design lavish residences and offices. Among these was the Price Tower, commissioned by Harold C. Price Sr. as a corporate headquarters for his eponymous company, a pipeline-construction firm. Meanwhile, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had wanted to develop a skyscraper ever since the early 1920s, when he drew up plans for the National Insurance Company Building, an unbuilt office tower in Chicago with cantilevered floor slabs.Original New York plans
The Price Tower is directly derived from Wright's unbuilt plan for the redevelopment of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in East Village, Manhattan, New York City. Wright had been friends with St. Mark's rector, William Norman Guthrie, since at least 1908. Guthrie wrote to Wright in October 1927, telling the architect about his intention to construct a high-rise building to alleviate the church's ongoing financial shortfalls. Negotiations over architects' fees continued over the next year. Guthrie asked Wright to waive all but $150 of his $7,500 design fee, claiming that the proposed buildings were located in an undesirable neighborhood and were thus unlikely to attract high-paying rental tenants. It was not until December 1928 that Wright sketched out designs for the St. Mark's towers. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a historian of Wright's work, wrote that the St. Mark's towers were loosely based on the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, which Wright had designed for his aunts at Taliesin, his family's estate in Wisconsin. To comply with New York City building codes, Wright devised plans for towers of between 10 and 20 stories.The initial design called for several 16-to-18-story apartment buildings between 10th and 11th streets west of Second Avenue. In contrast to the skyscrapers that predominated in Manhattan at the time, which had setbacks, Wright's designs resembled inverted cones. The floor plans, rotated 30 degrees from a rectangular ground-level site, were divided into quadrants around a pinwheel-shaped core. The rooms were laid out on a grid of parallelograms and triangles based on the 30-60-90-degree geometry. The floors would have been cantilevered outward from the core, the only part of each building anchored to the ground. A steel-and-glass curtain wall would have been suspended from the ends of each floor slab. The structures would have contained steel furniture and copper walls. The apartments would have been duplex units, with 36 units in each building; the second-floor units would have run diagonally across each structure.
Wright called his design "modern—not modernistic". Guthrie began to express doubts about the plans in 1930, following objections from St. Mark's vestry, and the project was ultimately canceled during the Great Depression. Afterward, Wright attempted to resurrect the St. Mark's project multiple times without success, including in his Broadacre City project. He continued to refine his tower design in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, the superstructure of the Johnson Wax Headquarters' research tower is similar to that of the St. Mark's towers, except for the design of the curtain wall. Wright's next building in New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, would not be constructed until the 1950s.
Bartlesville plans
By the 1950s, the H. C. Price Company wanted to develop a modern headquarters in Bartlesville. At the time, the city had 19,000 residents, and its only other tall building was a 14-story structure developed by the Phillips Petroleum Company. Sources disagree on how Wright and the Price family came in contact. Several sources write that the architect Bruce Goff, who chaired the University of Oklahoma's school of architecture, recommended that the Prices hire Wright to design the headquarters. According to Architecture: the AIA journal, Goff had become involved after Price's son Joe, a student at OU, had asked him for advice. Other accounts state that Harold Sr.'s wife, Mary Lou Price, had read about Wright and recommended him to her husband, or that Harold's sons and daughter-in-law had recommended Wright after attending one of the architect's lectures at OU. Initially, Harold Sr. did not believe that Wright would be interested in designing a headquarters for the Price Company, as Harold Sr. neither sought a corporate icon nor needed large amounts of space. His sons, Joe and Harold Jr., told their father that hiring Wright would be no more expensive than hiring any other architect to design a generic "box-type structure".The Prices went to Wright's Wisconsin studio, and Price and Wright haggled over the building's proposed height. Price had wanted a low-rise structure measuring two or three stories tall with space to park ten trucks. Although Price envisioned a structure with in total, Wright wanted a 25-story structure with 25,000 square feet per story. Price claimed a skyscraper would be "such a big building for a small town", while Wright countered that he had taken a regular low-rise structure and "stood it on end". Wright also allegedly told Price that "I'm going to give you the building I've been trying to build for 35 years." By August 1952, Harold Price Sr. sought to develop a building that was at least 10 stories tall, which would also include some apartments. Joe Price, one of Harold's two sons, later recalled that it took Wright two hours to convince Price to agree to a 12-story structure. As Harold Price Sr. later wrote, "We finally compromised on nineteen floors."
The final design was nearly identical to the St. Mark's design, although the dimensions of each floor at the Price Tower were smaller than those of the St. Mark's towers. The Price Company's vice president, John M. Thomas, later recalled that Harold Price "wanted that building to be a monument to the work our company had done, laying a pipeline through Alaska". On the other hand, Price himself said that "it was not our intent to build a monument" but that, nonetheless, the tower became a point of pride for Bartlesville. Wright thought the Bartlesville location was ideal because he believed that skyscrapers belonged in rural areas, where they stood out from the surrounding landscape. Joe Price also asked Goff to design a house next to the Price Tower, but after Wright asked if Goff's design was meant as a joke, the planned house was canceled.
Construction
In May 1953, Price announced plans for a high-rise tower to be built on a site at the northeastern corner of Dewey Avenue and Sixth Street in Bartlesville. The structure was to be tall, with a three-story penthouse for the Price Company, eight double-story apartments, and a two-story annex for the Public Service Company. Wright, who had added the apartments at the Prices' request, envisioned the Price Tower as a model for other mixed-use high-rises in smaller American towns and cities. Price had anticipated that the building would cost $500,000. Haskell Culwell, a company from Oklahoma City, was hired as the main contractor in July 1953. W. Kelly Oliver was the lighting consultant, L. B. Perkins was hired as the electrical engineer, and Collins and Gould served as the mechanical engineer. Subcontractors submitted extremely high bids for materials; for example, one bidder offered to install the exterior copper for $450,000, while another bidder offered to pour concrete for $300,000. During the building's development, there were also disputes between Wright and Price over such details as chairs.Work was delayed for several months due to difficulties in securing materials and widening a nearby street; in addition, it took more than a year to sketch out the design details. Groundbreaking took place on November 13, 1953, and site excavation was complete by that December. Wright's son-in-law and apprentice, William Wesley Peters, was appointed as Wright's on-site representative, and several contractors from Oklahoma and Texas were hired for the project. Wright visited Bartlesville in early 1954 to discuss the tower's design with 400 college students. Construction was temporarily halted that March due to a labor strike. Workers installed a temporary elevator hoist, which was extended upward as the building's superstructure rose. Simultaneously, the floor slabs were poured; the lowest stories took a month to pour, but workers became more efficient at pouring concrete as the structure ascended. By August 1954, concrete work had reached the sixth story, which had been poured in a week.
Work on the tower continued through late 1954, with workers completing one story every 12 days; the tower had reached the 15th story by December. The developers were so heavily focused on the Price Tower's completion that they discouraged sightseers from coming, and they did not respond to the myriad of inquires about the tower's construction. The 19th and final story was completed in February 1955, and workers began installing interior finishes on the lowest stories. In addition, workers began installing some of the windows. A topping out ceremony took place on March 14, 1955, at which point the building was scheduled to be completed in mid-1955. Joe Price was so heavily involved with the Price Tower's development that he lived on-site while the tower was being completed. By that October, the building was still not open, but the Price Company was preparing to receive its first tenants. In January 1956, in preparation for the tower's opening, Bartlesville's traffic committee voted to add parking spaces to the streets surrounding the tower.