Wright Skyscraper

by Jenny Revitz Soper

Title

Wright Skyscraper

Artist

Jenny Revitz Soper

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

The Price Tower is a nineteen-story, 221-foot-high tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the only realized skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of only two vertically oriented Wright structures existing (the other is the S.C. Johnson Wax Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin). It was commissioned by Harold C. Price of the H. C. Price Company, a local oil pipeline and chemical firm. It opened to the public in February 1956.

Wright nicknamed the Price Tower, built on the Oklahoma prairie, "the tree that escaped the crowded forest," referring not only to the building's construction but also to the origins of its design. The Price Tower is supported by a central "trunk" of four elevator shafts which are anchored in place by a deep central foundation, as a tree is by its taproot. The nineteen floors of the building are cantilevered from this central core, like the branches of a tree. The outer walls hang from the floors and are clad in patinated copper "leaves." The building is asymmetrical, and like a tree, "looks different from every angle." Wright had championed these design ideas as early as the 1920s in his design for an apartment complex of four cantilevered towers for St. Marks-in-the-Bowerie in downtown New York City. Following the effects of the Great Depression, the project was shelved and adapted by Wright for the Price Company in 1952. Wright, therefore, plucked his "tree" out of the "crowded forest" of Manhattan skyscrapers and placed it on the Oklahoma prairie where it continues to stand uncrowded by neighboring tall buildings.

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January 15th, 2017

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