Content area
Full Text
On the 9th of February in 1956, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, residents lined up for blocks to tour Frank Lloyd Wright's bizarre addition to their downtown. Soaring sunscreens, thrusting balconies, no right angles: how to make sense of it? Locals referred to it as a spaceship, a hood ornament, and "Price's folly," a reference to Harold C. Price, who had given the commission to Wright.
"People thought it was crazy because it didn't have walls until the very end," recalls Price's daughter-in-law Carolyn. "It looked like the backbone of a fish. But over the years they've come to like it. You could say it went from crazy eccentric to wonderfully eccentric."
Bartians (rhymes with Martians) are hoping that the old magic continues now that the tower has been converted to an arts center, with a 21-room boutique hotel designed by New York architect Wendy Evans Joseph, AIA. The town is still reeling from the recent departure of the Conoco/Phillips headquarters and in need of a boost. The Inn at Price Tower could be it. Where else can you visit a Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper and also get to spend the night?
Harold Price had made a fortune in the pipeline business and wanted to give something back to his hometown, something special, a new civic icon perhaps [record, February 1956, page 153]. So in 1952, Wright proposed a pinwheeling, 19-story, poured-concrete tower, with floors cantilevered from a central core like branches on a tree and supporting a combination of offices, apartments, and shops. It was an elaboration of his unbuilt St. Mark's in the Bowerie project of 1929, though with an asymmetrical plan and more complex program. Taliesin apprentice Fay Jones contributed to the working drawings.
"Tap root" schemes turn up repeatedly in Wright's work, including this exotic, mixed-use project in a remote Oklahoma oil town. The Bartlesville tower is an architectural summa of Wright's views on integrated living and working, the liberating power of technology, and the primacy of instinct and emotion. It is as much a social manifesto as a work of architecture.
Harold Price balked at first. He had been thinking of a two- , maybe three-story building, he told Wright. "Too much wasted space," the architect replied." "But it's such a big...