Frank Lloyd Wright designed a handful of skyscrapers in his 70-year career. Only one of them was ever built, the H. C. Price Tower in the unlikely location of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. By the standards of today’s super-tall buildings, Price Tower’s 19 stories barely qualify it as a skyscraper, but it looms large in architectural history since, like so much of what Wright designed, it did not so much follow a common genre as re-invent it.
Price Tower is as different from a conventional skyscraper as, say, Wright’s Guggenheim is from a conventional museum. Wright built it not on a steel or concrete frame but around a deeply rooted core that he likened to the trunk of a tree; the floors pinwheel around the trunk and cantilever out from it like branches, with apartments on one side and offices on the others. Wright called the copper-and-concrete Price Tower “the tree that escaped the forest,” the forest being the dense downtowns of skyscraper-filled cities such as New York, which he famously disliked. Wright wanted his tall building to stand alone on the prairie, with no other towers to compete with it.
