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Wright in Racine
Price Tower
Posted by:
mhertzberg on
May 12, 2011 at
9:50PM CST
Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg
The late Sam Johnson recalled asking Frank Lloyd Wright what his greatest building was, “The next one, young Johnson, always the next one.” I am sometimes asked to name my favorite Wright building. It tends to be the last one I have visited. Price Tower at sunrise Today, it is Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I can see south and west from our 14th floor hotel room, in one of the converted two-floor apartments in the Inn at Price Tower. I look past the copper louvers designed to shade the windows, as daylight fills the room. Price Tower, which was built in 1953-1956 primarily as offices for Harold Price’s petroleum pipeline construction company, with apartments and adjoining retail space, is now an arts center, office building, and hotel. The building has a contemporary look - even though it first appeared on Wright’s drafting table more than 80 years ago, as the unrealized St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie apartment buildings in New York City (1927-1929). St. Mark’s was Wright’s first modified taproot tower design: the walls of the building are not load-bearing. Instead, the core of the building is the main structural element, and the floors are cantilevered from it, just like the branches of a tree are cantilevered from from the trunk of a tree. The concept continued to percolate on Wright’s drafting table, and was reprised in several other unbuilt commissions.
Price Tower, reflected in the windows of the parking garage a block west: The top floor of the garage is an ideal spot for shooting pictures of the tower without the "keystoning" or distortion that comes from looking up at a building and shooting without a perspective correcting lens. Wright finally was able to build his taproot tower when the SC Johnson Research Tower (designed in 1943) opened in Racine in 1950. Still, he felt that St. Mark’s was not fully realized until the Price Tower opened. While the SC Johnson building is built around a central service core, St. Mark’s and the Price Tower have a pinwheel design in their modified taproot scheme. The walls separating the four quadrants of the building are the principal supporting elements. Price Tower has generally the same exterior design as St. Mark’s.In St. Mark’s, there were four duplexes or two-story apartments, on every other level. In Price Tower, there were originally offices in three quadrants of the pinwheel, and two-story apartments in the fourth wing. The horizontal louvers in Price outline the office windows and the vertical louvers - sometimes referred to as fins - mark the apartments’ windows.
The St. Mark’s concept appears in Wright’s model of Broadacre City, his 1935 scheme to decentralize the city. Wright wanted both Johnson and Price to build their office buildings outside of town, but both demurred. Model of Broadacre City photographed at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and used with permission of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum. The Johnson tower adjoins Wright’s SC Johnson Administration Building (1936). The two buildings look as if they were designed at the same time, rather than seven years apart. They both have Cherokee red bricks and miles of Pyrex-glass tube windows. The exterior of the Research Tower is easier to grasp at a glance than the exterior of Price Tower. As Scott Perkins, curator of the Price Tower Art Center points out, Johnson’s window scheme focused attention inside the building; Price Tower’s design directs the view to the outside.
The Johnson tower looks the same on all four sides above the second (entry) floor. The visual clues in its design are simple: the brick bands that encircle the building denote the placement of the square or “main” floors, while the alternate round or “mezzanine” floors are surrounded by glass-tube windows. Price Tower, by contrast, has a richer variety of elements, depending on what side of the building one is looking at. There are thin horizontal windows (formerly offices), tall vertical windows (formerly apartments), and square casement windows (kitchens and bathrooms in the apartments). Bands of stucco, rows of copper panels, and horizontal copper louvers tell our eye to look from side-to-side, around the building...until we get to the vertical louvers that make us look up and down the building. These elements are not merely decorative, they help us interpret Wright’s design.  East side, with stair landings, left. Then, so we do not get complacent, we see triangles: there are stucco triangles at each landing of the outside stair tower (slanted like the prow of a ship), and smaller copper-clad triangles that were the apartment balconies. Finally, looking up at the dozens of rows of horizontal louvers, particularly from one of the landings of the exterior stairs, one might think of the roof lines of a Japanese temple.
The external stairs, at sunrise, above. Design elements seen from the stairs, below:
Lying on my back, looking up at the stair landing a floor above me.
One cannot imagine the SC Johnson Research Tower as a much taller building because of the bands of brick and glass that encircle and contain the building’s lines. The “nostril” on top of the service core, which caps the building at the roof level, is a definitive statement that the building’s lines are finite. However, the lines of the Price Tower are so dynamic, that we can imagine it continuing to soar higher and higher, like the corporate skyscrapers that were built contemporaneously across America. Looking up from the terrace of the Copper Bar, formerly the Price Company employees' commissary.The "light needle," lit at night, was designed as an antenna. At night it is somewhat overpowered by the floodlights that illuminate the upper floors.
Above: Corporate apartment, restored, on 17th and 18th floors.
Wright designed metal furniture for the Larkin, Johnson, and Price office buildings. At Price Tower he used aluminum, a relatively new material. Eighth floor hotel room, in a former office.
Living room and balcony in two-floor hotel room (former apartment) on 13th and 14th floors. The copper panels are like the ones on the exterior.
Inside Mr. Price's 19th floor office; mural by Eugene Masselink.
Price Tower at sunset. 
Wright's signature square by front door.
"HCP Co." medallion on each floor of the Price Tower. Bibliography: Anthony Alofsin, Joseph Siry, Pat Kirkham, Scott W. Perkins, Hilary Ballon, Richard Townsend, Monica Montagut: Prairie Skyscraper - Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2005. Wright, Frank Lloyd, The Story of the Tower - The Tree that Escaped the Crowded Forest. Link:
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