Price Tower - Bartlesville, OK - Odd-Shaped Buildings on Waymarking.com

The National Register nomination form for The Price tower begins "Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower is a strikingly handsome monument to one of the world's greatest architects ... a somewhat breath-taking adaptation of an essentially urban concept -- the skyscraper -- to a basically rural setting." A few sentences later Wright is quoted as saying, "to the rolling plains of Oklahoma" the skyscraper had come "as a fresh realization of the advantages of modern architecture yet unknown to the great city."

As for the tower, it definitely is not one of the modern slab sided monstrosities soaring into the sky that line so many of the streets of the major US cities. Begin with a cantilever design, then add 60 degree parallelograms instead of conventional rectangles for the floors. Then combine office space with living space where three of the four quadrants of a floor are for office and the fourth quadrant is part of a two story loving space.

None of the exterior walls are structural, they are mere resting on the cantilevered floors and pre-oxidized copper louvers serve as screens across the windows. The green patina of the copper being one of the qualities of the tower. The The nineteenth, which was the top floor contained the personal office of H.C. Price who had the Tower built. There was even a roof garden outside his office.

All the glass throughout the building was gold tinted. Specially designed copper plates were used to decorate the fascia on the buildings exterior. Wright was famous for his furniture designs, but in the tower, as only part of it was occupied by the H.C. Price Company, only the floors occupied by the firm had furniture designed by Wright.

To sum up, and to use Wright's own words to describe his creation, it is "the tree that escaped the forest." Anyone who stands before the Price Tower knows just how true those words are.

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