Last year, when a number of stories broke about historic Los Angeles estates, including Marilyn Monroe’s last home, under threat of demolition by new, wealthy owners, and celebrity couple Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger, who unassumingly bought then razed the Craig Ellwood–designed Zimmerman House—the internet flew into a frenzy. But since the August announcement that Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper, Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is facing an uncertain future at the hands of its recent owners, the news has been met with comparatively little fanfare on social media platforms like TikTok, X, and Reddit.
Sold in March 2023 to a pair of married crypto entrepreneurs who reportedly promised to spend $10 million to restore it, the National Historic Landmark has been through a good deal of turmoil in the last few months. This spring, local media started reporting that the building’s owners were selling off some of its Wright-designed fixtures and furniture, including some copper tables and panels, an armchair, and a one-0f-a-kind directory board, to a midcentury-design dealer in Dallas, Texas—a move that drew legal challenges and the ire of the architect’s staunchest custodians. The building then went up for auction and was set to be sold in October, but following a few legal challenges and questions about what’s exactly included in the sale, the building is now set to hit the auction block on November 18, opening at a relatively low $600,000.
Frank Lloyd Wright points to a model of Price Tower in 1953. The 221-foot building in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is the only Wright-designed skyscraper ever realized.
Standing 19 stories tall with cantilevered concrete floors that pinwheel out from around a deeply rooted central core, Price Tower stands alone in the city’s low-slung skyline, earning the nickname Wright once gave it: “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.” Wright’s design for the 221-foot skyscraper with green, oxidized copper panels and sun louvers was originally intended for a series of 1920s New York apartment towers that were never constructed due to the Great Depression. When the H.C. Price Company, an oil and gas corporation, tapped Wright to build its Bartlesville headquarters in the early ’50s, the architect reworked those unbuilt designs into a single tower that housed offices and apartments for the company.
The story of how Price Tower became endangered starts innocuously enough, with a city’s shrinking economy and an optimistic group of arts enthusiasts doggedly determined to keep the building up and running. In 1981, the Price company relocated to Dallas and sold the tower to Bartlesville-based oil company Phillips Petroleum, which used it for storage until 2001, when it donated the building to a newly formed nonprofit known as the Price Tower Arts Center. The nonprofit conducted an 18-month exterior and interior conservation of the 1956 structure, enlisting architect Wendy Evans Joseph to turn some of the building’s offices and apartments into a boutique hotel and restaurant, as well as a small museum/gallery space. The site also hosted tours for Wright enthusiasts.
Around that time, Price Tower Arts Center also commissioned Zaha Hadid for an expansion of the building that never came to fruition—a move that in hindsight should have been a clear indication that the consortium was overreaching. In the years between then and 2023, the nonprofit struggled to fund regular operations as well as necessary building maintenance and upgrades.
Price Tower was listed as one of Wright’s most significant works by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1960 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007. After years of financial struggles, private investors bought the debt-saddled skyscraper for $10 (and the assumption of a standing $600,000 loan), promising to invest $10 million in improvements to the building.
With Price Tower deeply in debt, the ownership team made the decision to sell Wright’s only built skyscraper to private investors Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, who said they would use the building to create a so-called “Silicon Ranch” in Bartlesville, drawing new businesses and tech start-ups to the area. (Technically, the company that bought Price Tower, Copper Tree Inc., is led by Ms. Blanchard, while the couple’s crypto business, Herasoft, is helmed by her husband.) The Blanchards reportedly promised new restaurants, developments, and that they’d assume a standing $600,000 loan taken out by the nonprofit. They got a sweetheart deal in turn, paying a mere $10 for the building and getting an additional $88,000 in economic development funds from the Bartlesville Development Authority to bring in a pair of fancy restaurants. At the time, Ms. Blanchard Source link
