Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower

Here’s the thing about America: you can race through a lot of it and see nothing but grids of green and brown, nothing but corn and pumpjacks and corn and rusted trains and more corn. And just when you’re thinking that you really understand the term fly-over country, you drive into something like Bartlesville and wonder what else you’ve been speeding past. A former oil boom town in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, Bartlesvile is the birthplace of Phillips Petroleum. It’s also where Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper stands.

Wright’s tower was originally designed as a mixed-use New York apartment building for St. Mark’s Place until the Great Depression killed the project. Twenty-five years later, Harold C. Price contacted Wright about building the headquarters for his burgeoning pipeline operation in Bartlesville. Wright dusted off the blueprints and went to work, apparently unaware that he was building in Oklahoma rather than the Bowery. Christened the Price Tower, Wright dubbed it “the tree that escaped the forest.” Not only does the tower stand in the middle of open prairie rather than among the clutter of lower Manhattan, it’s also built upon a modular structure of cantilevered concrete “branches”, forming a cramped interior that would make perfect sense in New York but seems a little unhinged on the Great Plains.

Notorious for appearing on his former clients’ doorsteps to rearrange the furniture and toss their trinkets, Wright was no different with Price. If the CEO must keep a globe in his office, Wright demanded that it should be hidden behind the door so as not to interfere with his beloved triangles. Triangles are everywhere in the Price Tower: three rooms to a floor, each devoid of any right angles. And because this is a Wright building, every minor detail bears his touch: the shower is a triangle stall, the wastebasket is a triangle that slots neatly into the 60-degree angle formed by the legs of the desk, the copper facade is echoed in the copper furniture and copper mesh curtains, and so on.

Now you can sleep here. I first heard about the Inn at Price Tower after picking up a copy of The Atlantic Monthly last year at the Kansas City airport and stumbling across Wayne Curtis’s fantastic article, Little Skyscraper on the Prairie. I swung a sharp left and pointed the rental car at Bartlesville. After the roar of the road, Price Tower is the perfect place to catch your breath in the middle of America. It’s dead quiet. One night I arrived quite late and there was a handwritten sign taped to the door: “Welcome Mr. Reeves! Call us for your key.”

The Price Tower is a fascinating building, but it’s Bartlesville that sticks in my mind: from the Tower, it’s a short walk to the Philips Petroleum Museum, a handful of cheap diners, and a classic Main Street caught in post-industrial transition. Inside the Tower, they’re courting top-shelf architects for additional buildings (including a boomerang-shaped annex by Zaha Hadid), aggressively buying up blueprints and journals for their architecture library, and in 2008 there was optimisticl chatter about transforming Bartlesville into a playground for starchitects.

The mood in 2009 was more somber. The housing crisis put the freeze on many of these ambitious plans. Whether or not they come to pass, it’s comforting to know you can always drive like mad across the plains, stumble into a Frank Lloyd Wright building in the middle of the night, and wake up the next morning to listen to an elderly lady wearing an “I Hate Mondays” sweater rhapsodize about Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art before crossing the street to tour a museum dedicated to the bootstrapping spirit of an oil company. Something about Bartlesville tells me that America’s going to be alright.