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.
He got his wish, but its obscure location is perhaps why Price Tower is one of the architect’s least known and least visited masterworks. And its slightly off-the-radar status may well have a lot to do with a recent series of bizarre events surrounding the building, especially the circumstances under which Anthem and Cynthia Blanchard, a couple behind several defunct ventures in crypto-currency and blockchain, came to own it.
The Blanchards, who moved to Bartlesville in 2021 and started another crypto-blockchain company, Herasoft, bought the tower in March of 2023 from the Price Tower Arts Center, the nonprofit group that had owned it since 2001, for $10 plus assumption of roughly $600,000 in debt that the arts center had accumulated. The new owners promised to invest $10 million in the building, talked of filling its offices with tech tenants and of adding two new restaurants and a private club on the upper floors. Bartlesville, they said, would become “Silicon Ranch.”
Wright wanted his tall building to stand alone on the prairie, with no other towers to compete with it. He got his wish, but its obscure location is perhaps why Price Tower is one of the architect’s least known and least visited masterworks.
None of this happened. Instead of investing in the landmark tower, the Blanchards treated it more like an asset to be stripped. They shipped many of the original furniture pieces and other artifacts Wright had designed for the building off to a dealer in Dallas, violating an easement the arts center had negotiated years before with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which required that all historic, Wright-designed elements remain in the building. The Blanchards then persuaded three Herasoft employees who were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars by the company to take an equity stake in the tower instead of cash, promising, one of the employees said, that they would quickly flip the tower for a profit and “everybody would get their money back and a whole lot more.” The Blanchards then put Price Tower up for auction. (“We are not pillaging the tower, which I’ve been accused of,” Cynthia Blanchard said on the local Bartlesville radio station.)
Their antics, if you can call them that, have led to the closing of a Wright-themed hotel and restaurant within the tower that for several years was the pride of Bartlesville, and one of the few things that attracted at least a few tourists to the city. Now the handful of nonprofit arts groups that were based in the structure have been evicted, the building has been entirely closed to tourists and visitors, and its future is uncertain. That is only the latest chapter in what has been one of the most curious, not to say sad, sagas in modern architectural history.
Broken Promises
It is worth starting at the beginning, in 1952, when Harold Price approached Wright to design a new headquarters for his pipeline company, based in Bartlesville. (Wright had been suggested by Bruce Goff, the gifted and under-recognized architect who headed the architecture school at the University of Oklahoma.) Wright, never one to miss an opportunity to turn a minor commission into a major one, not only took the job but convinced Price that his company needed not the four-story building his client had envisioned but a skyscraper that would dominate the center of Bartlesville and would have room for commercial tenants as well as several duplex apartments with striking, double-height spaces. Price’s own office was to be in a penthouse at the top.
For Wright, it was an opportunity to revise a remarkable design he had conceived in 1928 for St. Mark’s in-the-Bouwerie, the church in Lower Manhattan that commissioned him to design a cluster of apartment towers that its pastor hoped would support the church financially. The Depression put an end to that project, but not to Wright’s desire to get a version of it built somewhere, somehow. Price gave him his opportunity 24 years later, and the Oklahoma adaptation of the St. Mark’s tower was finished in 1956.
For the first few decades, all was well. The tower was admittedly quirky and less than efficient, but it appealed to the individualistic and ambitious Price, and it put Bartlesville on the map. But in 1981 the H. C. Price company moved to Dallas and sold the building to Phillips Petroleum, who used it mainly for storage. In 1990, Phillips offered the Bartlesville Museum an expansive area on a lower floor to use for exhibitions, and by the end of that decade, the museum had renamed itself the Price Tower Arts Center. In 2001, Phillips donated the entire building to the arts center.
Instead of investing in the landmark tower, the Blanchards treated it more like an asset to be stripped.
The arts center started out with high ambitions to turn Bartlesville’s best-known building into both a serious cultural center and an economic engine for the town. Wendy Evans Joseph, the New York architect, was brought in to convert a portion of the building into the Inn at Price Tower, which opened in 2003; Anthony Alofsin, an eminent Wright scholar, curated a 2004 exhibition on the history of the tower that opened at the building and later moved on to the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., and the Yale School of Architecture. And the arts center also retained the architect Zaha Hadid to do an expansion—an act that, in retrospect, should have been a clear sign that the arts center’s reach exceeded its grasp.
Hadid, based in London, visited Bartlesville in the early 2000s, but her sketches ultimately came to nothing except for a modest wave of publicity that created the false impression that things were going better in Bartlesville than they were. The Inn was lovely, but there was not enough architectural tourism in Bartlesville to make it profitable. The high quality of Alofsin’s authoritative exhibition was not equaled by subsequent shows. Fast-forward, then, to 2023, by which time the arts center was deeply in debt, and its management decided that the best way out was effectively to give the building away.
It now seems hard to believe that a small, poorly funded arts organization in an out-of-the-way Midwestern city would ever have had the wherewithal to add a wing by Zaha Hadid to a building by Frank Lloyd Wright that it could barely afford to maintain. It is likewise difficult to know why anyone thought that Price Tower would magically begin to throw off profits once a pair of crypto operators with a history of questionable ventures took it over. But the arts center appears to have believed the Blanchards’ promises. So did the city of Bartlesville, which gave a Santa Monica restaurant operator chosen by the Blanchards $88,000 in economic-development funds, only to see one of the two restaurants he promised to open in Price Tower close after less than three months, and the other never to open at all.
The Blanchards also argued, incorrectly, that since the easement protecting the interiors of Price Tower held by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a national nonprofit group that works to save all endangered Wright buildings, was negotiated with the Price Tower Arts Center and not with them, it was invalid. (In fact, easements are legal agreements that run with the deed of a property, and they are designed specifically to survive changes of ownership.)
The conservancy, which recently negotiated another easement—this one with the designer Marc Jacobs to protect a Wright house that he purchased in Westchester County—said in a statement that it was “fully engaged in assuring that the easement protections are enforced.” It has hired an Oklahoma attorney “to consider our options for defending the easement,” according to Barbara Gordon, the conservancy’s executive director.
It now seems hard to believe that a small, poorly funded arts organization in an out-of-the-way Midwestern city would ever have had the wherewithal to add a wing by Zaha Hadid.
“Price Tower was immensely important to Wright,” Alofsin said to me when I reached him by phone. “It was always his dream to show his way of doing a tall building, and it was in pristine condition when we did the exhibition in 2004. I was completely unaware of the extent of the problems. I am shocked. I worry about whether it could even go the way of the Imperial Hotel or the Larkin Building”—two of Wright’s great works that were demolished.
There is one thing that differentiates the Price Tower situation from those losses. The Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, the local paper, has pursued the matter with a degree of energy and determination that is rare in the local press these days, presenting the story as a case of carpetbaggers fleecing an entire town and using its best-known building to do it.
Just the other day, Andy Dossett, the reporter who has led the coverage, discovered that two respected local entrepreneurs, John Snyder and his daughter, Macy Snyder-Amatucci, who restored a historic hotel in Tulsa, signed a contract last May with Cynthia Blanchard’s company, Copper Tree, to purchase the tower, and have filed legal notices stating that whoever wins the auction will have to contend with their claim to be the bona fide purchaser.
Nevertheless, Price Tower is scheduled to be auctioned off on Ten-X, an online commercial-real-estate auction site, on October 7, with a starting bid of $600,000.
Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic, is the author of several books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry and Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
