Frank Lloyd Wright’s Only Skyscraper Is in Danger. Where’s the Uproar?

Last year, when a number of stories broke about historic Los Angeles estates, including Marilyn Monroe’s last home, under threat of demolition by new, wealthy owners, and celebrity couple Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger, who unassumingly bought then razed the Craig Ellwood–designed Zimmerman House—the internet flew into a frenzy. But since the August announcement that Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper, Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is facing an uncertain future at the hands of its recent owners, the news has been met with comparatively little fanfare on social media platforms like TikTok, X, and Reddit.

Sold in March 2023 to a pair of married crypto entrepreneurs who reportedly promised to spend $10 million to restore it, the National Historic Landmark has been through a good deal of turmoil in the last few months. This spring, local media started reporting that the building’s owners were selling off some of its Wright-designed fixtures and furniture, including some copper tables and panels, an armchair, and a one-0f-a-kind directory board, to a midcentury-design dealer in Dallas, Texas—a move that drew legal challenges and the ire of the architect’s staunchest custodians. The building then went up for auction and was set to be sold in October, but following a few legal challenges and questions about what’s exactly included in the sale, the building is now set to hit the auction block on November 18, opening at a relatively low $600,000.  

Standing 19 stories tall with cantilevered concrete floors that pinwheel out from around a deeply rooted central core, Price Tower stands alone in the city’s low-slung skyline, earning the nickname Wright once gave it: "the tree that escaped the crowded forest." Wright’s design for the 221-foot skyscraper with green, oxidized copper panels and sun louvers was originally intended for a series of 1920s New York apartment towers that were never constructed due to the Great Depression. When the H.C. Price Company, an oil and gas corporation, tapped Wright to build its Bartlesville headquarters in the early ’50s, the architect reworked those unbuilt designs into a single tower that housed offices and apartments for the company.

The story of how Price Tower became endangered starts innocuously enough, with a city’s shrinking economy and an optimistic group of arts enthusiasts doggedly determined to keep the building up and running. In 1981, the Price company relocated to Dallas and sold the tower to Bartlesville-based oil company Phillips Petroleum, which used it for storage until 2001, when it donated the building to a newly formed nonprofit known as the Price Tower Arts Center. The nonprofit conducted an 18-month exterior and interior conservation of the 1956 structure, enlisting architect Wendy Evans Joseph to turn some of the building’s offices and apartments into a boutique hotel and restaurant, as well as a small museum/gallery space. The site also hosted tours for Wright enthusiasts.

Around that time, Price Tower Arts Center also commissioned Zaha Hadid for an expansion of the building that never came to fruition—a move that in hindsight should have been a clear indication that the consortium was overreaching. In the years between then and 2023, the nonprofit struggled to fund regular operations as well as necessary building maintenance and upgrades.

With Price Tower deeply in debt, the ownership team made the decision to sell Wright’s only built skyscraper to private investors Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, who said they would use the building to create a so-called "Silicon Ranch" in Bartlesville, drawing new businesses and tech start-ups to the area. (Technically, the company that bought Price Tower, Copper Tree Inc., part of Green Copper Holdings, is led by Ms. Blanchard, while the couple’s crypto business, Herasoft, is helmed by her husband.) The Blanchards reportedly promised new restaurants, developments, and that they’d assume a standing $600,000 loan taken out by the nonprofit. They got a sweetheart deal in turn, paying a mere $10 for the building and getting an additional $88,000 in economic development funds from the Bartlesville Development Authority to bring in a pair of fancy restaurants. At the time, Ms. Blanchard told the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise that the $10 million in improvements to the Wright-designed landmark would come from tax credits, incentives, a federal Property Assessed Clean Energy loan, and other funding sources she declined to specify, adding: "Don’t worry about it because it’s there."

It only took a few months before rumors started to swirl about trouble in the tower. In April, the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise reported that the Blanchards had started stripping the building of some of its artifacts, hocking them on 1stDibs through Dallas dealer 20c Design. Someone tipped off the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy about the listed items from the Price Tower collection, which, in addition to FLW-designed furniture and fixtures, included the Shin'enKan gate by Bruce Goff, Wright’s mentee. The organization sprang into action, reminding the couple of an existing easement they had on the property protecting items within the building from sale without the Conservancy’s approval, granted during a period in 2011 when the building was seeking recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After the Conservancy took legal action, making the matters public, the Blanchards pushed back, saying they weren’t pillaging the tower but instead trying to save it and insisting that the easement expired with transfer of ownership. (In a recent New York Times story about the plight over Price Tower, Liz Waytkus, executive director of modern architecture preservation organization Docomomo US, said that the sold FLW items were akin to "trafficked goods," likening them to "pottery of vases from Egypt or Mesopotamia that were obtained through illegal ways.") On October 21, Green Copper Holdings, along with Copper Tree Inc. and Cynthia Blanchard, filed a lawsuit against the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and Price Tower Arts Center, claiming that the preservation easement is null and void. The Conservancy responded with a public statement, saying it "strongly objects to the baseless claims of the lawsuit and stands by the terms of its easement."

Unfortunately for the Blanchards, news also got out that the couple had persuaded three of its crypto employees who were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay to take an equity stake in the building instead, with Ms. Blanchard allegedly telling the staffers that the plan was to flip the tower for a profit so that "everybody would get their money back and a whole lot more." In August, Price Tower was put up for auction on real estate site Ten-X, where it’s listed alongside two former Hardee’s drive-throughs and a defunct Rite Aid. That came as a surprise to a group of Tulsa hoteliers, who said they’d been in talks with the Blanchards to buy the building for some time, with the intention of restoring the space and rebranding the hotel. For now, the building is closed up, with all former tenants forced to vacate and existing property employees laid off.

It’s been estimated since that the building will probably go for somewhere around $4 million when it sells, with the Blanchards standing to clear about half of that in profit—news that’s got Bartlesville locals and media in a bit of a state. Some national media outlets have piled on as well, with publications like The Architect’s Newspaper, Dezeen, and Graydon Carter’s Air Mail reporting on the saga. Mr. Blanchard has also been charged with fraud for crypto and investing acts separate from Price Tower, muddying the waters around the whole mess even more.

But while Wright-loving preservationists are up in arms about the threat to the future of Price Tower, the reaction on social media has been quieter than with other recent preservation crises, like the Monroe and Zimmerman houses (both of which spawned angry posts from everyday users that racked up thousands of comments and views). The Price Tower news has popped up in USModernist’s newsletter and on Instagram accounts like @SaveIconicArchitecture, though the drumbeat isn’t quite as loud. (In August, one Threads user even wrote, "This should be getting way more attention" when posting about the pending auction.) Perhaps that’s because of the tower’s location, a more widespread affinity for architecturally significant homes than office buildings, or even some sense of optimism about what could come out of the auction. It’s also possible that the celebrity aspect of the Monroe and Zimmerman home stories is what made those examples go viral more than a widespread reverence for historic architecture. Still, at least one Redditor’s "open statement to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy" in September read: "Where are the lawsuits?.... Public outrage is not only warranted—it is demanded."

A few idle suggestions have been bandied around by commenters and internet gadabouts, to be sure, like one Instagram user’s motion that the tower should be moved to Tulsa, or another’s thoughtful but perhaps misguided tagging of Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, who lives in Oklahoma, with the question, "Know any cool people in OK who could do the right thing here?" Elsewhere, a trio of real estate podcasters posited that the building "would be fantastic…in Times Square," before suggesting the tower could be adaptively reused and turned into "an OnlyFans incubation studio" or a gaming facility.

Perhaps the best online response to the saga, however, has come from TikTok user Courtney Manning (@CourtneyakaMrsPants), who gave volunteer tours of Price Tower up until its closure earlier this fall. (And has posted a lot of those tours to her page, if you want to get a better look inside.) She’s been able to do great boots on the ground coverage, capturing the locked doors and moving trucks when the building shut down, posting footage of her closing up the museum spaces for potentially the last time, and detailing the artwork and artifacts that have gone missing from the Price Tower collection under the Blanchards’ tenure. (She said the curator of the building wasn’t allowed in at one point, since they would have been able to determine what was really missing.)

Manning, who grew up in the area and says she first toured Price Tower when she was eight or nine years old, loves the building so much she even did an independent study on it in college. Though she wasn’t involved in the Price Tower Arts Center’s decision to sell to the Blanchards, she says she doesn’t understand how the group was so fooled by the pair, who she has met "on numerous occasions." 

 "If [the Arts Center] would have spent five minutes looking into them, they would have realized that they had no money," Manning says. "It just hurts my heart, because I respected that group so deeply and I don’t know what they were thinking."

Manning says she hopes whatever national attention the controversy around the Price Tower auction has received makes the Blanchards feel like they have to make a "good decision"—meaning one that benefits not only them, but also the community. "Everyone’s watching," she says, "so I would hope they don’t want to embarrass themselves even more." 

Top photo of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, by Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo

This article was originally published on October 21, 2024. It has been updated to include information about the lawsuit filed against the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and Price Tower Arts Center by Green Copper Holdings.

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