The Price Tower is a nineteen-story, skyscraper at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States. One of the few high-rises designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Price Tower is derived from a 1929 proposal for a group of apartment buildings in New York City. Harold C. Price Sr., the head of the pipeline-construction firm H. C. Price Company, commissioned the tower. The building was widely discussed when it was completed in 1956. It received the American Institute of Architects' Twenty-five Year Award in 1983 and has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
The H. C. Price Company wanted to develop a modern headquarters in Bartlesville, and Harold Price hired Wright to design it in 1952. Groundbreaking took place on November 13, 1953, with a topping out ceremony in March 1955. The Price Tower opened on February 10, 1956, attracting thousands of sightseers. The Price Company sold the tower in 1981 to Phillips Petroleum, which occupied the tower's offices until the mid-1980s. Phillips donated the structure to the Price Tower Arts Center in 2001. The arts center subsequently converted part of the building into a museum, opening a boutique hotel and restaurant on the upper stories. The Price Tower was sold in 2023 and closed in 2024 following financial issues and legal disputes. It was resold in 2025 to McFarlin Building LLC, which began renovating it into a hotel and residential building that year.
As built, the Price Tower had about of rentable space, split across one residential and three office quadrants. The floor plan is laid out on a grid of parallelograms with 30-60-90 triangles, arranged around a pinwheel-shaped structural core with four piers. The facade includes embossed copper spandrels and louvers, tinted glass windows, and poured stucco surfaces. The reinforced-concrete floors are cantilevered outward from the structural core. Initially, the residential and office portions of the building were accessed by different lobbies and elevators. The top three stories originally functioned as a penthouse apartment and office for the Price family. Although the exterior has remained intact over the years, the interiors have been converted to various uses.
Site
The Price Tower is at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, in Washington County in northeastern Oklahoma, approximately north of Tulsa. It is on a city block bounded by the now-closed Silas Street (formerly Sixth Street) to the south, Dewey Avenue to the west, Fifth Street to the north, and Osage Avenue to the east. The tower's base occupies two land lots measuring a combined . Work on the park began in March 2019, and it opened in May 2020. Among these was the Price Tower, commissioned by Harold C. Price Sr. as a corporate headquarters for his eponymous company, a pipeline-construction firm. Meanwhile, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had wanted to develop a skyscraper ever since the early 1920s, when he drew up plans for the National Insurance Company Building, an unbuilt office tower in Chicago with cantilevered floor slabs.
Original New York plans
The Price Tower is directly derived from Wright's unbuilt plan for the redevelopment of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in East Village, Manhattan, New York City. Wright had been friends with St. Mark's rector, William Norman Guthrie, since at least 1908. Guthrie wrote to Wright in October 1927, telling the architect about his intention to construct a high-rise building to alleviate the church's ongoing financial shortfalls. Negotiations over architects' fees continued over the next year. Guthrie asked Wright to waive all but $150 of his $7,500 design fee, claiming that the proposed buildings were located in an undesirable neighborhood and were thus unlikely to attract high-paying rental tenants. It was not until December 1928 that Wright sketched out designs for the St. Mark's towers. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a historian of Wright's work, wrote that the St. Mark's towers were loosely based on the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, which Wright had designed for his aunts at Taliesin, his family's estate in Wisconsin. To comply with New York City building codes, Wright devised plans for towers of between 10 and 20 stories.
The initial design called for several 16-to-18-story apartment buildings between 10th and 11th streets west of Second Avenue. In contrast to the skyscrapers that predominated in Manhattan at the time, which had setbacks, Wright's designs resembled inverted cones. The floor plans, rotated 30 degrees from a rectangular ground-level site, were divided into quadrants around a pinwheel-shaped core. The rooms were laid out on a grid of parallelograms and triangles based on the 30-60-90-degree geometry. A steel-and-glass curtain wall would have been suspended from the ends of each floor slab. The structures would have contained steel furniture and copper walls. and the project was ultimately canceled during the Great Depression. He continued to refine his tower design in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, the superstructure of the Johnson Wax Headquarters' research tower (completed in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1950) is similar to that of the St. Mark's towers, except for the design of the curtain wall. Wright's next building in New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, would not be constructed until the 1950s. Sources disagree on how Wright and the Price family came in contact. Several sources write that the architect Bruce Goff, who chaired the University of Oklahoma's (OU) school of architecture, recommended that the Prices hire Wright to design the headquarters. According to Architecture: the AIA journal, Goff had become involved after Price's son Joe, a student at OU, had asked him for advice. Other accounts state that Harold Sr.'s wife, Mary Lou Price, had read about Wright and recommended him to her husband, or that Harold's sons and daughter-in-law had recommended Wright after attending one of the architect's lectures at OU. Initially, Harold Sr. did not believe that Wright would be interested in designing a headquarters for the Price Company, as Harold Sr. neither sought a corporate icon nor needed large amounts of space. His sons, Joe and Harold Jr., told their father that hiring Wright would be no more expensive than hiring any other architect to design a generic "box-type structure".
The Prices went to Wright's Wisconsin studio, Price had wanted a low-rise structure measuring two or three stories tall with space to park ten trucks. Although Price envisioned a structure with in total, Wright wanted a 25-story structure with 25,000 square feet per story. Wright also allegedly told Price that "I'm going to give you the building I've been trying to build for 35 years." Joe Price, one of Harold's two sons, later recalled that it took Wright two hours to convince Price to agree to a 12-story structure. As Harold Price Sr. later wrote, "We finally compromised on nineteen floors." On the other hand, Price himself said that "it was not our intent to build a monument" but that, nonetheless, the tower became a point of pride for Bartlesville. Wright thought the Bartlesville location was ideal because he believed that skyscrapers belonged in rural areas, where they stood out from the surrounding landscape. Joe Price also asked Goff to design a house next to the Price Tower, but after Wright asked if Goff's design was meant as a joke, the planned house was canceled.
Construction
In May 1953, Price announced plans for a high-rise tower to be built on a site at the northeastern corner of Dewey Avenue and Sixth Street in Bartlesville. Wright, who had added the apartments at the Prices' request, envisioned the Price Tower as a model for other mixed-use high-rises in smaller American towns and cities. Price had anticipated that the building would cost $500,000. Haskell Culwell, a company from Oklahoma City, was hired as the main contractor in July 1953. W. Kelly Oliver was the lighting consultant, L. B. Perkins was hired as the electrical engineer, and Collins and Gould served as the mechanical engineer. Subcontractors submitted extremely high bids for materials; for example, one bidder offered to install the exterior copper for $450,000, while another bidder offered to pour concrete for $300,000. During the building's development, there were also disputes between Wright and Price over such details as chairs.
Work was delayed for several months due to difficulties in securing materials and widening a nearby street; in addition, it took more than a year to sketch out the design details. and site excavation was complete by that December. Wright's son-in-law and apprentice, William Wesley Peters, was appointed as Wright's on-site representative, and several contractors from Oklahoma and Texas were hired for the project. Construction was temporarily halted that March due to a labor strike. Workers installed a temporary elevator hoist, which was extended upward as the building's superstructure rose. Simultaneously, the floor slabs were poured; the lowest stories took a month to pour, but workers became more efficient at pouring concrete as the structure ascended.
Work on the tower continued through late 1954, with workers completing one story every 12 days; the tower had reached the 15th story by December. The developers were so heavily focused on the Price Tower's completion that they discouraged sightseers from coming, and they did not respond to the myriad of inquires about the tower's construction. The 19th and final story was completed in February 1955, and workers began installing interior finishes on the lowest stories. In addition, workers began installing some of the windows. at which point the building was scheduled to be completed in mid-1955. In January 1956, in preparation for the tower's opening, Bartlesville's traffic committee voted to add parking spaces to the streets surrounding the tower.
Price ownership
Completion and early years
thumb|The lobby
The Price Tower opened for media previews on February 4, 1956, and the building officially opened five days later on February 9. Only residents of Bartlesville were allowed to tour the structure on the first day, and the general public was allowed to visit over the weekend of February 11 and 12. The opening ceremonies attracted 13,000 sightseers. A retrospective Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article claimed that the Price Tower had cost $2.4 million to construct, while contemporary estimates ranged as high as $13 million. The Price family publicly cited the building's cost as $6.5 million,
Harold Price was proud of the structure, placing images of it on the cover of his company's newsletter, Tie-In; The apartments were variously cited as having been rented out for $285 or $325 a month. employing sixty people there. and an ophthalmologist's office. The building's tenants later included doctors and lawyers, as well as communications, utility, and real-estate firms. Bruce Goff moved into the Price Tower's 9th-and-10th-floor apartment Two years after the Price Tower opened, it still attracted 40 to 50 tourists during the weekend, though two of the eight apartments were vacant. The sundial, which was installed next to the tower's southwest corner in November 1961, In 1960, Taliesin Associated Architects, the successor firm to Wright's practice, drew up plans to convert some of the unused apartments into offices. Although the Price family continued to take pride in the building's design, Joe Price said the company did not earn much from rental income; even if the Price Tower were fully occupied, it would still earn only $24,000 a year. Goff later recalled that, though up to five of the apartments were sometimes rented simultaneously, there were times when he was the only resident. During that time, the lobby displayed a rotating exhibit of photographs that Joe Price had taken while on a safari. Thirty-five to forty Price Company employees still worked at the Price Tower in the early 1970s. The remaining apartments were converted to office space in the 1960s and early 1970s, and only the Price penthouse remained by 1972. which was finished in 1982. The drive-through counter between the main tower and its annex was enclosed in the late 1970s, The exterior remained almost entirely unchanged, which wanted to preserve the building. Phillips formally took over the Price Tower in April 1981, and The Daily Oklahoman wrote the next month that Phillips had paid $2.5 million. Though Phillips preserved the building's interior decorations, it left the penthouse unused. and by 1983 there were media reports that Phillips planned to move out of the building. Phillips moved out during the middle of the decade.