Price Tower

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.