Content area
Full Text
Wright's historic Oklahoma tower dons a new interior
For many architects, the prospect of updating anything by Frank Lloyd Wright might conjure up feelings of paralyzing respect and downright fear. But for New York-based Wendy Evans Joseph, recently commissioned to install a new hotel and restaurant in Wright's legendary 1956 Price Tower Arts Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with just one previous hotel to her credit, the experience proved inspiring, not intimidating. Instead, the heady challenge was respecting Wright's singular style while daring to identify ways to improve it.
Price Tower came into Joseph's life early in 2002, just after she'd completed her first hotel, the Greenporter in Greenport, New York, which caught the eye of Price Tower director Richard Townsend. She was soon charged with creating the new six-floor, 21-room Inn at Price Tower and its rooftop bar/restaurant Copper-even faced with inventing what she calls "an entirely new vocabulary of furniture."
Her solution for adding new interiors worthy of...