Frank Lloyd Wright’s sole skyscraper, one of three buildings the architect completed in Oklahoma, will be offered for sale at auction in October. Tenants—including a hotel, arts organisation and local magazine—will need to relocate by the end of August. The news follows months of uncertainty, speculation and drama involving everything from the illicit sale of the building’s specially designed furniture to a cryptocurrency business gone bad in the city of Bartlesville (about 45 miles north of Tulsa), where the copper-and-concrete Price Tower has stood for almost 70 years.
According to Andy Dossett, a local journalist who has been covering the Price Tower saga for the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise for more than a year, members of the general public will be able to bid on the historic landmark between 7 and 9 October via the online real-estate auction house Ten-X. The starting bid is $600,000.
The landmark building is currently owned by a local couple named Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, who bought it (along with its estimated $600,000 in debt) in March 2023 for only $10. Through their company Copper Tree, the Blanchards promised to pay down the debt while investing $10m in the landmark skyscraper and revitalising it as a tech hub. The project was also given $88,000 in public tax incentives.
The Price Tower’s entrance court Photo: Warren LeMay via Flickr
But less than a year later, after a failed attempt to open two restaurants on the premises (and the implosion of the Blanchards’ blockchain anti-ransomware and gold-backed crypto companies), the couple started selling off literal parts of the building—including furniture that Wright had designed specifically for the building. This went against the wishes of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which holds the easement on the building. Doubling down, the Blanchards have consistently told reporters that they have a right to sell whatever they want from the building.
When Dossett interupted Cynthia Blanchard and her associates as they were loading pieces of a gate designed by the architect Bruce Goff (a friend of Wright’s who lived in the tower for several years) into a truck outside the Price Tower in April, she reportedly yelled across the parking lot: “Andy, what the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck are you doing? Are you trying to kill the tower?” She later told him that she and her husband had sold the gate in order to “save” it, adding that “the community should be thanking us”.
Earlier this month, Dossett reported that the Price Tower’s debt has quadrupled to $2m since the Blanchards took over. Many outside observers interviewed for Dossett’s stories called the whole situation “sad”. Meanwhile, Wright’s conservancy has filed claims against the Blanchards and their companies, and warns that it “will seek legal recourse against any purchaser of items in the Price Tower collection that are covered by the conservancy’s easement”.
Wright designed furniture specifically for the Price Tower, some of which has been sold without the permission of the architect’s conservancy Photo: Warren LeMay via Flickr
Rise and fall of a landmark
The Price Tower, designed in 1952 and completed four years later, was created as the corporate headquarters for the H.C. Price Company, founded by Harold C. Price and specialising in building oil pipelines. From the beginning, the building also included apartments, shops and space for other offices in its 19 floors. Like most of Wright’s buildings, the Price Tower was inspired by nature—in this case, a lone tree in a clearing that looked different from every angle. (Wright also designed a house for Price and his wife in Arizona, as well as one for their son Harold in Bartlesville.) In 1974, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
When the H.C. Price Company moved its headquarters to Dallas in 1981, it sold the Price Tower to Phillips Petroleum, which used the building mostly for storage out of safety concerns. In 2001, the tower was donated to the non-profit Price Tower Arts Center. In 2003, after a comprehensive renovation project (its last one to date), the Price Tower opened a hotel—which became a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Hotels of America in 2014.
The Price Tower’s lobby Photo: Warren LeMay via Flickr
In 2007, the Price Tower was declared a National Historic Landmark. In 2015, together with nine other Wright buildings (including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York), the tower was nominated for inscription as a Unesco World Heritage Site. The proposal was rejected, and when it was resubmitted and ultimately accepted in 2019, the Price Tower had already been removed from the group.
A dearth of funding and mounting debt led to the Price Tower Arts Center’s decision to sell the building to a developer who would revitalise the building. Consequently, the Price Tower was acquired to the Blanchards in 2023.
Dossett, the local journalist, estimates that the tower could sell for $4m, which would net the Blanchards a $2m profit—taking into account the $2m in debt they have accumulated. The owners of the historic Mayo Hotel in Tulsa, which was vacant for almost 30 years before undergoing a major restoration project, have confirmed that they are interested in buying the Price Tower and reviving it as well.
