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Price Tower
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Price Tower is the nineteen-story reinforced concrete tower Frank Lloyd Wright built between 1952 and 1956 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, for the pipeline contractor Harold Price, one of only two Wright-designed skyscrapers ever built and the only one still standing. Every floor cantilevers outward from a single pinwheel-shaped structural core, so the whole tower rises with no perimeter columns at all, an idea Wright had first drawn in 1929 for an unrealized New York apartment tower and finally realized here at a fraction of that scale. Copper louvers, meant to weather to a soft green patina, shade the glass curtain wall, and Wright himself nicknamed the building the tree that escaped the crowded forest, a rare skyscraper standing alone on a small-town skyline rather than massed among others of its kind. It received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award in 1983.
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Location510 South Dewey Avenue, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States 1 Architectural StyleOrganic architecture applied to a skyscraper, the whole tower cantilevered from a single central core like a tree from its trunk, which Wright called the tree that escaped the crowded forest. 1 Structural SystemA pinwheel-shaped reinforced concrete core with four main piers carries every floor, which cantilever outward from that core with no perimeter columns. 1 Primary MaterialReinforced concrete, copper louvers and spandrels, glass, aluminum trim, with mahogany and copper interior furnishings. 1 Building TypeMixed-use tower (offices and residences) 1 Commissioned ByHarold C. Price Sr., head of the H.C. Price Company, a pipeline construction firm 1 ConstructionCompleted 1956; the design derives from Wrights unrealized 1929 St. Marks-in-the-Bowery apartment tower project. Floor Area (sqm)Approximately 42,000 square feet of rentable space. Height (metres)221 feet including the spire; 186 feet (56.7 m) excluding it. Storey Count Current UseClosed and under renovation as of 2025 for conversion into residential units and hotel rooms 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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