REAL ESTATE: Prairie Skyscraper

The town of Bartlesville (pop. 21,000), at the foot of the Osage Hills in northeastern Oklahoma, is famed as the site of Oklahoma’s first commercial oil well. On display last week at the International

MODEL OF PRICE TOWER Below the backbone, a pinwheel.

Petroleum Exposition in Tulsa was a 10-ft.-high model of an 18-story office and apartment building that will give citizens of Bartlesville something new to boast about. The skyscraper, designed by Architect Frank Lloyd Wright,* will be built for Bartlesville by Booster Harold C. (for Charles) Price, wealthy builder of oil and gas pipelines (including the Big Inch and Little Big Inch.

When the Price Tower is completed, in about a year, at an estimated cost of $1,500,000, it may well be the costliest building, foot for foot, ever erected in the U.S. It will also be one of the few times a skyscraper has been designed for both office and living quarters. (There will be eight luxurious two-story apartments.) Like most Wright designs, the construction is radically different from other skyscrapers. The backbone of the building will be four hollow reinforced concrete pillars, each 18 ft. wide. They will be embedded to form a pinwheel in a concrete platform 25 ft. underground. The floors will be hung from the pillars like spans from the piers of cantilever bridges. With this construction, the entire building is expected to weigh only one-seventh as much as one of similar size but conventional construction.

To protect office workers from the Oklahoma sun, the huge windows with gold-tinted glass will have long louvers to admit only indirect light. From the tower’s top, visitors will get an unobstructed view of miles of Oklahoma prairie; the 186-ft tower itself (with a 30-ft.-high TV spire added) will be visible for 20 miles.

* For other doings of Architect Wright, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.