Price Tower – Bartlesville, Oklahoma - Atlas Obscura

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Price Tower

The only fully-realized skyscraper built by the famed American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. 

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Price Tower, located in a town about an hour northwest of Tulsa, is the only skyscraper that Frank Lloyd Wright built during his 70-year-long career. The building was completed in 1956 for Harold Price, who owned an oil pipeline construction company. The Price Company had outgrown their current office space and met with Mr. Wright in the hopes of designing a larger space for them to move into.

Much to the Price Company’s surprise, Frank Lloyd Wright came up with the plan for a 19-story building intended for mixed-use that would hover over everything else in the small town. The building was created out of concrete slabs that branch out like a tree, and the exterior walls were decorated with ornamental pieces of copper and gold-tinted glass (to mimic the look of leaves). Wright affectionately commented that this building was “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.”

The Price Company occupied the top three floors of the building until they sold it to the Phillips Petroleum Company in 1981, who then passed it on to the Price Tower Arts Center in 2001 who have taken upon multiple restoration attempts to keep the building looking how it did upon completion in 1956.

The Price Tower is currently open as a hotel .

Know Before You Go

The building is still in use as office space throughout the different levels, but it also houses a museum on the bottom floor, a restaurant, and hotel suites for those looking to experience the building up close and personal.

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