(January 17, 2009)
At a Lambda Alpha meeting the other day, at a table full of architects, the subject of the Price Tower came up. I’m not a fan, and I said so, calling it an amazing failure – prompting one of my tablemates to get up and eat at another table. Should I worry? Was I wrong? Maybe it’s worth going over why.
The Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was built for Harold C. Price, to house his oil services company. Price was presumably tied to Phillips Petroleum, also in Bartlesville. 1952 was very late in Frank Lloyd Wright’s career, and it is the only skyscraper he built. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I know why he wasn’t asked again.
Seen from the front door of the Hotel Phillips, the Tower glowed in the early evening. Copper and glass reached upward in an elegant mix of organic and cubic forms. It towered over the rest of downtown Bartlesville. A vision like this hardly seemed possible 40 minutes north of Tulsa.
My disorientation didn’t begin until I took my first step toward it. This had to be some trick of perspective, because it filled my vision much too fast. It couldn’t possibly be that close, and that small – but it is. A two-block walk reveals the truth – the Price Tower is only 221 feet tall.
I’ve actually been in it twice. The first was a rainy day tour, in a few spare hours before sprinting for a flight. Three docents were sitting around waiting for a visitor, and one peeled off and came over when I entered. Where was I from? Oak Park, Illinois, I told her. A wave of excitement came over the docents, and it was clear I was going to get the full tour.
The scratchy, grainy movie that precedes the tour is that faded kodachrome tending towards orange, and shows a doddering FLW standing in a cornfield, holding up the top of what may be rye grass, and other wildflowers, and gesticulating. The footage is silent, so you can see his string bow tie flapping in the Oklahoma wind, his pork pie hat barely staying on, and it isn’t hard to imagine phrases like “unifying structure” and “forms from nature.” All good stuff, and all present in the building. So is the red concrete that makes up every floor, made from local soil.
Nobody talks about size. It turns out that size matters, a lot.
The building was based on 1929 drawings for a Manhattan building, unbuilt, that were gathering dust in a drawer at Wright’s studio, Taliesin West. The look was what Wright and Price wanted, but the Price company wasn’t a big company, and Bartlesville isn’t Manhattan. So the tower is about a third the size of Wright’s vision.
Approaching the tower from the Hotel Phillips, one’s first impression is that it’s getting big much too fast. As the saying goes, Objects are Closer than they Appear. It’s 19 stories of poured red-tinted concrete, with copper accents, and seven foot ceilings. The elevators are big enough for three adults, or one with luggage. (It’s now a hotel.)
This is late-period Wright, full of personal touches. Price clearly gave him full control of the project, and said yes to nearly every proposal. (In a notable exception, Price insisted that he be allowed to put a telephone in his office, over Wright’s aesthetic objection. Wright famously called Price the day that he moved in, and when Price answered, Wright said “as long as you made me put the damned thing in, I wanted to make sure you use it.”)
But the rest is a Wright fantasy. Most of the cabinetry is built-in, and customized to fit the near-complete absence of 90-degree angles in the building. When the building opened, the staff included a full-time carpenter, because nothing in the building could be modified or repaired without a protractor and a compound miter saw. Price’s office remains intact, furnished with cast-metal chairs straight off the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
A modern office building, even in 1950 had typical floor sizes of 13,000 to 25,000 square feet. Wright’s New York design was closer to 2,200. Photos of the engineering space of price’s operation depict three or four desks, and windows showing the Oklahoma prairie beyond, all well and good. A visit to the building reveals that the photo required leaning the tripod against the opposite wall and standing to one side, because three or four offices is all that would fit.
It’s a spectacularly original. It hasn’t had the expensive restoration that the Meyer May home in Grand Rapids received. (Steelcase, which funded the May renovation, tasked its engineers with understanding why Wright’s enormously deep original eaves, had sagged and collapsed. Their conclusion: It can’t be done with wood- the Meyer May house is made of steel now.) There was definitely help, ConocoPhillips reports that it had the pleasure of turning down an offer of $1 million, so that it could spend $5 million getting the building ready for donation.”
But the real reason that the original aluminum, single-glazed windows and door handles and pecan veneer are still in place? There’s no formal explanation given for why the building was vacant for nearly 30 years, but there are clues. In the chairman’s office, the one with the much-debated phone, the file cabinets are still crammed with folders and documents from Price’s operations, despite the 30-year idle period.
Imagine an indulgent company with a doddering chairman and owner, one who had subjected the employees to his personal dream, and to Wright’s senile half-baked execution of a plan for another city and another scale. As the chairman aged, the staff would gradually move everything important to a nice rectangle somewhere else in Bartlesvillle. When Price was ready to retire, the only people left would be his assistant and a couple of favorite engineers, and all the important paper would be copied and in the office of a solid vice-president with a ground-floor window office in One Rectangle Place. So when Price finally died, or retired, the faithful assistant would heave a sigh of relief, turn off the lights, and lock the door on a completely empty, useless, beautiful dream.