Price Tower

Wright first designed this building in 1927 as St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie, a cluster of apartment towers for a crowded block in New York City. The stock market crash of 1929 killed the project, and the drawings sat in his files for a quarter century. When the oilman Harold Price came looking for a headquarters, Wright pulled the old design back out and planted a single tower of it in Oklahoma, calling it the tree that escaped the crowded forest.

The structure works like a tree in more than name. A central concrete core, sunk deep like a taproot, carries the whole load, and each floor cantilevers outward from it, so the outer walls hang free rather than holding the building up. This let Wright wrap the tower in thin copper fins and glass instead of heavy masonry, and it let him rotate the plan into a pinwheel of four unequal quadrants, three for offices and one for two-story apartments.

Bartlesville sat at the heart of Oklahoma's early oil wealth. It was here that the first commercial oil well in what would become the state came in around 1897, and the town grew into a headquarters for the industry, most famously for Phillips Petroleum, founded by the brothers Frank and L. E. Phillips. The H. C. Price Company, which built the tower, made its money laying the great cross-country pipelines that carried that oil to market.

That a firm from a small prairie town could commission the era's most famous architect says a great deal about the money and ambition the oil boom brought to Oklahoma. The land had been the Osage Reservation, and the Osage Nation, whose mineral rights made its members among the wealthiest people in the world for a time in the 1920s, remains centered just west of here. The tower is one monument of that oil century, standing over a town the industry built.

Wright designed almost everything about the tower, down to the furniture, the metal reliefs, and the cast-concrete patterns. The copper louvers that shade the glass have gone green with age, and the whole exterior is a play of verticals and diagonals that changes as you walk around it, since no two faces are the same. Inside, Wright's murals, built-in cabinetry, and a two-story apartment survive as he intended them.

For a small town, having a Wright skyscraper is both a gift and a burden. The tower has passed through several owners and uses over the decades, serving as an arts center, a museum, and a boutique hotel at various times, and its condition and what is open to the public have changed with each chapter. It is best to check ahead, but even seen only from the sidewalk it is one of the most remarkable buildings in the American interior.

Bartlesville itself is worth a wander, a walkable downtown of early-twentieth-century commercial buildings, with the Bartlesville Community Center, another late Wright-influenced design, nearby. The town's oil-baron history is written into its handsome houses and civic buildings.

Just outside town, the ranch of oilman Frank Phillips, called Woolaroc, spreads across the Osage hills as a wildlife preserve and museum, home to bison, elk, and longhorn cattle and a deep collection of Western and Native American art. The surrounding Osage prairie, tallgrass country rolling to the horizon, is some of the last great unplowed grassland in the country.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.