Arts center offers taste of architect Frank Lloyd Wright

BARTLESVILLE, Okla. -- For visitors who really want to linger in architect Frank Lloyd Wright's tallest building, there will soon be beds.

A 21-room boutique hotel is scheduled to open early March inside the Price Tower, whose 19 stories Wright designed for New York City but realized only on the prairie of this northeast Oklahoma oil town.

Floors that once sat paint-peeling and abandoned are being sleekly transformed. There's a new restaurant with sweeping views.

But for enthusiasts of Wright's pioneering work, the real amenity is simply the chance to stay.

"It's like living in a museum," says John Womack, an Oklahoma State University architecture professor who's eagerly awaiting an overnight visit.

The Price Tower is the only manifestation of Wright's ideas of what an urban high-rise should be.

He originally proposed it in 1929 as a Manhattan apartment building, but it wasn't built until the H.C. Price pipeline company asked Wright to design its new headquarters nearly 25 years later.

Tower was 'a tree'

Wright called the tower "a tree that escaped the crowded forest." He gave it cantilevered floors for limbs and covered it in green copper blades. Inside, walls stand at angles, windows open to the outside air and elevators are as small as telephone booths.

"It's not the plain old glass box piled on a glass box," says admirer James Goulka, the president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The Price Tower is not the only high-rise sprouting from the plains of this city of 34,000; the longtime presence of Phillips Petroleum Co. ensured that.

A decade after the Price company dissolved, though, the tower sat abandoned and in disrepair.

Looking at all those empty floors and the Wright fans who kept coming, the new caretaker, a local non-profit arts group, decided a hotel was one way to give the tower a future.

"And you couldn't have a Motel 6 interior," says Richard Townsend, executive director of the Price Tower Arts Center. "You had to design something that was unique, appropriate, hip."

With Phillips donating the building and refurbishing and with another $5 million in fund-raising, the arts center commissioned New York architect Wendy Evans Joseph to create the Inn at Price Tower.

The group's mandate: No alterations to structural walls and no "Fake Lloyd Wright."

The center, Townsend says, wanted something distinct that worked with Wright's design, not a copycat.

Joseph drew on the tree theme in designing strong-lined furnishings of maple and copper pipe, leaf-themed murals and rugs made in Tibet and Indiana in soft oranges and greens. Because of the narrow elevators, the furniture had to be constructed on the spot, room-by-room.