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Middle of Nowhere: Vertical House on the Prairie

The Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma

By Charlene Rooke

Photo by Jeff Millies & Hedrich Blessing

Occasionally, when you travel, it’s worth going a little bit out of your way to stay at a nice hotel – which is how I find myself on the home stretch of a 2,500-kilometre journey to the Price Tower Inn in Bartlesville in the northeast corner of Oklahoma. On the drive from Tulsa, tidy farms lie in flat parcels along a highway dotted with “Keep Our Land Grand” signs and storefront placards that boast, “Okie Owned!” I wonder how it looked more than 50 years ago, when the greatest living American architect – the octogenarian cape-wearing Frank Lloyd Wright – swept into town to build his tallest skyscraper, the pinnacle of his long career.

I’d seen a few oil derricks from the air, but nothing prepared me for the five-metre-tall red 66 in the style of the old Phillips gasoline signs. “The Temple Oil Money Built!” the Robert Indiana sculpture seems to announce, an introductory gesture to the bizarre pinwheel tower behind it, built by the pipeline giant the Price Company.

The Price Tower sprouts from the landscape like some alien vegetation, its trunk petrified into cast concrete, its coppery leaves oxidized to green. A “tree that escaped the forest,” Wright called it. I check in, ride up to the 10th floor in a tiny trapezoidal elevator and spend several fun minutes playing Search for the Right Angle in my triangular-shaped hotel room, then a few minutes more gaping at the endless prairie views through the two walls of aluminum-clad windows. The tower’s still nearly the tallest thing around. “On a good day, you can see Kansas,” folks here say.

Though Wright apparently recycled the idea from his plans for a 1920s New York project that was never built, the design channels the local spirit: the concrete floor coloured the dark red of Okie dirt; repeating geometric patterns echoing Native American motifs; the embellished nine-metre-tall copper spire like a slim totem pole. I stand on one of the engraved plaques running through the centre of every floor like vertebrae and feel the lines of energy emanating through the very middle of the Midwest, the belly button of a continent.

“Big cities are out of date, out of character with modern life. They have become overcrowded architectural pigpiles,” I read in a yellowed Denver Post clipping of a 1956 Wright interview. He advised young Americans to “stay at home and be beautiful and productive” in their hometowns. Funny thing is, 50 years later, Bartlesville is listening.

In 1956, the tower was a vertical main street, complete with shops, offices, funky rental apartments and the public utility company. After years as corporate offices, it has returned to its mixed-use mandate: boutique hotel, restaurant, art gallery, gift shop. And after years of decline, young people have started moving back to Bartlesville: buying up old prairie-style houses, shopping for mid-century antiques. Pritzker Prize-winner Zaha Hadid has designed an expansion for the tower. Karim Rashid held a solo exhibition here. This might just be the hippest small town in the USA.

There’s a name for this: civic tourism, small towns preserving their built and cultural history, not only to attract architourism geeks like me but also to enhance their own way of small-town life. Whatever’s happening in Bartlesville, it doesn’t feel like 50-year-old ideals – it feels like now, y’all.