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ARCHITECTURE {TYPE} FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT H.C. PRICE TOWER BARTLESVILLE, OKLAHOMA
* The H.C. Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., a monument to oil riches -- and to the legendary architect -- has been reopened as an arts center.
IF architecture were music, surely Frank Lloyd Wright would be roots jazz -- a true and living American art form.
Wright's only skyscraper, his beloved building, the H.C. Price Tower, which he called "the tree that escaped from the crowded forest," has been officially reopened to the public as an arts center. The building, in Bartlesville, 45 miles north of Tulsa, has been imitated but never duplicated.
On Feb. 10, when the wind blew through the copper louvers on the penthouse, you could actually hear the H.C. Price Tower sing.
Red ribbons danced just out of reach of official scissors, leaping wildly in the wind that truly does come sweeping down the plain. A serpentine plume of white smoke and the scent of burning cedar rosin rose to the sky from an open 19th-floor terrace as Evelyne Voelker of Millstadt performed American Indian cleansing rites.
Eric Lloyd Wright, the great man's grandson, bowed his head in reverence as the pungent cedar smoke was brushed over his heart, his back and his head with the eagle feather fan of a Comanche chief. Wright, also an architect, was the "stand-in" for the blessing, representing the life force of the building.
Voelker's assistant held the shell, which contained the smoking cedar rosin, said by the Comanche to be the "tears of the tree." Before the ritual began, Voelker spoke movingly of Wright's intent in the design of the building to create the independent spirit of a lone tree looking out over the prairie.
"Mr. Wright intended that this building should be like a tree; a tree that reaches in faith toward the sky...