Everybody has fantasies. Mine has always been to spend a night with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Not literally, I hasten to add.
My longing is the product of one too many frustrating pilgrimages to Wright masterpieces such as Fallingwater in the hills of western Pennsylvania or Taliesin West in the desert outside Phoenix. You tour the place. You are dazzled by Wright’s ability to make visual poetry out of such prosaic materials as concrete and desert stone. Then — “Move it along!” — they shoo you out the door to make way for the next group of camera4-toting archi-tourists.
As a result, I’ve long desired to live in a Wright building rather than just tour it. I wanted to eat in it, sleep in it, wake up in it, brush my teeth in it. Who knew that, to do it, I’d have to journey all the way to Bartlesville, a dot on the map in northeast Oklahoma, 40 miles north of Tulsa, that is home to 35,000 people and one of the world’s most idiosyncratic skyscrapers — Wright’s Price Tower?
When it opened in 1956, the pinwheeling, 221-foot-tall high-rise with the copper louvers and the gold-tinted windows housed offices, apartments and stores. Then it was mothballed because, like a lot of things Wright designed, it proved wildly impractical. Now it has been given new life as a chic boutique hotel, restaurant and art center. And it is, quite simply, magical.
With the rooms extending out like branches from the tower’s structural core, you feel as if you’re up in a tree house, looking out over the Great Plains. How intensely pleasurable was it to be there? Let me put it this way: When it was time to turn in, I didn’t want to turn out the lights.
To be sure, there are two other Wright buildings where you can pay to stay the night — the Seth Peterson Cottage in Lake Delton, Wis., and the Louis Penfield Residence in the Cleveland suburb of Willoughby Hills. (I haven’t visited either.) But the Price Tower offers something that neither of these dwellings can: A rare glimpse into Wright’s vision of urban life.
Wright being Wright, that vision comes complete with elevators the size of telephone booths. Yet if you are aesthetically inclined, you happily put up with such oddities, as you would tolerate the eccentricities of a great artist who is going to show you the world in a way you’ve never seen it before.
Like the Robie House, the Prairie School masterpiece in Chicago that was built for a forward-thinking bicycle and automobile supply maker, the Price Tower was commissioned by a hard-driving entrepreneur — Harold C. Price, who made his fortune building oil pipelines.
In 1915, Price came to Bartlesville, already an oil boomtown, and eventually started the company that would construct pipelines across Alaska and Canada. With the prodding of his sons, who attended lectures at the University of Oklahoma by the Oklahoma architect Bruce Goff, Price hired Wright in 1952. And Wright gave him a skyscraper that was unconventional.
Instead of a boxy high-rise supported by an internal cage of steel, the Price Tower suggested a tree. Internal concrete columns acted as the trunk. Floors cantilevering off the columns served as the branches. The trunklike concrete core was hollow, containing those tiny elevators and other building systems. It also divided the tower into quadrants (three for offices, one for duplex apartments) that would allow people to live and work in the same structure. Wide copper fins — vertical for the apartment windows, horizontal for the offices — were supposed to protect the building from the hot glare of the sun. Which, of course, they didn’t.
Cute sculpture
Even today, the mastlike skyscraper is a remarkable sight, an arresting piece of sculpture that constantly takes on a new appearance as you move around it. It simultaneously soars over the houses and storefronts of downtown Bartlesville and seems utterly diminutive, like one of those penny-colored architectural miniatures. The word “cute” almost rolls off the tongue.
Wright preferred to call it “the tree that escaped the crowded forest,” a reference to his unbuilt St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie apartment building for New York City, the design on which he based Price Tower. Seeing how Wright placed the tower’s diamond-shaped footprint at an angle to the street grid, you sense that he wanted it to stand alone, like the high-rises in his visionary plan for a decentralized “Broadacre City.”
“The skyscraper is no longer sane unless in free green space,” he wrote in 1958, the year before he died. “In the country it may stand beautiful for its own sake.”
Like a lot of path-breaking projects, though, the Price Tower proved utterly unworkable.
The duplex apartments were far too small. The triangle-shaped floor plans were ill-suited for office use. The air-conditioning plant and the copper louvers weren’t enough to keep the building from baking in the fierce Oklahoma sun. In 1981, the Price Co. sold the tower to Phillips Petroleum and in the early 1990s, Phillips mothballed it.
Then, in 2001, Phillips donated the skyscraper to the non-profit Price Tower Arts Center and contributed another $3.5 million for renovation work, including a much-needed new air-conditioning system. The Arts Center had a plan: Turn the upper floors of the tower into a hotel and restaurant, and use the profits to help bankroll an ambitious schedule of public programs and exhibitions.
The job cost $2.4 million and the work, designed by New York City architect Wendy Evans Joseph was finished last April. As you might expect, a boutique hotel in Bartlesville isn’t exactly doing a booming business. The hotel lost money last year, according to the Arts Center’s energetic 39-year-old director, Richard Townsend. But the word is starting to get out and this year, he said, the hotel expects to make a modest profit.
There’s no reason it shouldn’t. When I visited a few weeks ago, the result exceeded my expectations of what it would be like to stay in a Wright building — perhaps because it wasn’t all designed by Wright.
Just don’t go expecting The Four Seasons.
The slightly oddball character of the place quickly became apparent when Townsend was leading me and a group of architecture school deans through the tower (we moved about in knots of three or four because only that many could cram into the toll booth-size elevators). The Oklahoma wind was sweeping off the plain, as the lyrics in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical say. As we looked at a duplex apartment on the 17th floor, one of the copper louvers — it had come loose — was banging furiously against the tower. You wondered if the whole building was about to collapse.
Moments earlier, we had strolled through the former 19th floor office of Harold Price, an impressive two-story space with a copper, wood-burning fireplace. It seems frozen in time, including its very elegant, but very narrow, Wright-designed desk furniture. “Mr. Price liked very slender secretaries,” Townsend joked.
The room is due to be fully restored by 2006, marking the tower’s 50th anniversary. The Arts Center also plans an addition by the London architect Zaha Hadid that will contain new gallery space and wrap around the base of the tower like a boomerang. Fundraising for that ambitious, sure-to-be-controversial project is to start later this year.
For now, you can enjoy the hotel rooms, which occupy six upper floors of the tower. They turn out to be quite comfortable — far more comfortable, you suspect, than if Wright had designed them himself.
Extending Wright’s metaphor of the skyscraper as a tree, Joseph conceived of the rooms as the lacy in-fill of leaves and smaller branches between the main branches of a tree. Accordingly, her light wood furniture is delicate and sticklike, in part because it had to be brought in pieces up the tiny elevators and assembled upstairs.
Bias against the tall?
The furniture also is low-slung (the bed practically touches the floor) to make the small rooms appear larger than they are. At their lowest point, the rooms are just 6 feet, 9 inches tall. (Wright, who was short in stature, often designed spaces that made tall people stoop.)
To further relieve the grip of Wright’s vicelike space, Joseph used curtains instead of blinds. That brings the expansive feeling of the outdoors inside and allows the visitor to take in the full sweep of the surrounding countryside, including the Osage Hills. Glimpsed through horizontal bands of windows, those views are stunning, revealing Wright’s expertise at framing a vista. He would slice it on the top and on the bottom to perfectly control your view, just as in the Japanese prints he so admired.
On the other hand, when my head hit the pillow at the Inn at Price Tower, my ears picked up the whirring of elevator machines. The tower’s small floor plate causes the problem, putting rooms right next to the elevator shafts. The hotel’s new showerheads, meanwhile, were too short for someone of my height (6 foot 3). Joseph, it seemed to me, was guilty of extending Wright’s discrimination against the tall.
Imaginative use of materials
But I could live with those forgivable faults, and Joseph more than made up for them with her imaginative use of materials, including the copper plumbing tube she turned into towel racks. The racks, light and airy in contrast to Wright’s heavy copper louvers, are very much in the freethinking spirit of Goff, who once used diamond-shaped pieces of ashtray glass to bring light into a house foyer.
Joseph’s most striking use of the material comes in the 15th- and 16th-floor bar and restaurant, which is, appropriately, called Copper. In this dazzling two-story space, she used a copper fire screen for curtains and crafted the copper bar into a curve that recalls Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The views, needless to say, knock your eyes out.
The project is an exemplary exercise in the art of respectful contrast, with Joseph wisely opting to subtly evoke Wright rather than mimic him. In a sense, she lets visitors have it both ways, drinking up the spaces and the spirit of Wright without subjecting themselves to his disregard for personal comfort.
For this visitor, the pilgrimage was a sweet dream come true, the noisy elevators and the too-short showerhead notwithstanding.
