In addition, the Price Tower received the American Institute of Architects' Twenty-five Year Award in 1983, and it has also been designated as a National Historic Landmark.

[10] Bartlesville, a small city in northeastern Oklahoma, had become economically prosperous in the late 19th and 20th centuries due to the success of the local oil industry.

[17] Meanwhile, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had wanted to develop a skyscraper ever since the early 1920s, when he drew up plans for the National Insurance Company Building, an unbuilt office tower in Chicago with cantilevered floor slabs.

[18][19][20] The Price Tower is directly derived from Wright's unbuilt plan for the redevelopment of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in East Village, Manhattan, New York City.

Guthrie wrote to Wright in October 1927, telling the architect about his intention to construct a high-rise building to alleviate the church's ongoing financial shortfalls.

Guthrie asked Wright to waive all but $150 of his $7,500 design fee, claiming that the proposed buildings were located in an undesirable neighborhood and were thus unlikely to attract high-paying rental tenants.

[28] Guthrie began to express doubts in Wright's plans in 1930, following objections from St. Mark's vestry,[34] and the project was ultimately canceled during the Great Depression.

Several sources write that the architect Bruce Goff, who chaired the University of Oklahoma's (OU) school of architecture, recommended that the Prices hire Wright to design the headquarters.

[68] Work was delayed for several months due to difficulties in securing materials and widening a nearby street;[69] in addition, it took more than a year to sketch out the design details.

[b] Several reasons have been cited for Phillips's relocation, including the 1980s oil glut,[14] the opening of the nearby Plaza Office Building in 1985, and a decline in the local labor force.

[132][137] Phillips agreed in August 1998 to donate the building to the PTAC after the arts center raised a $3.5 million endowment fund for the tower's future operation.

[169] The Copper Restaurant and Bar's chefs-in-residence program, and the Pioneer Woman Museum in nearby Ponca City, Oklahoma, were credited with increasing the Price Tower's popularity.

[172] By 2022, the Price Tower experienced financial issues due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, decreased revenue and donations, and the deaths of two Silas family members.

[196] The Price Tower was supposed to have been sold at an auction in early October 2024,[178][197] which was halted amid a lawsuit from Snyder's company, McFarlin Building LLC, over whether an earlier sale agreement covering the structure was still active.

[59][116] Wright nicknamed the Price Tower "the tree that escaped the crowded forest", referring both to the building's design and to his original plans for a New York skyscraper.

[222][219] Wright, a major proponent of organic architecture,[218][221] believed that the roof gardens and glass-and-steel facade would help integrate the building's interior and exterior.

[95] PTAC executive Michael Christopher described Wright as having planned the building as an "urban microcosm concept, where you would live, work, eat, and shop all in the same space".

[91][241] Wright designed chairs with heavy aluminum bases, sloped arms, and hexagonal seatbacks, which were custom-made by a firm from Dewey, Oklahoma,[68][91][244] and failed to sell commercially.

[246] Each apartment had a narrow entrance vestibule, with a stair leading to the upper level,[246] as well as a small kitchen with various appliances, laminate counters, and a trash chute.

[246] A glass skylight illuminated each apartment's upper level,[76] and Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink decorated the upper-level balustrade with a copper artwork.

[269] The Nowata, Oklahoma, Daily Star regarded the tower as "slim and graceful",[87] and the Tulsa Tribune wrote that the building "adds a distinctive note" to Bartlesville's downtown.

[270] The author Allan Temko said that, even though the Price Tower "makes use of standard parts, mass produced by machine technology", it was a good example of Wright's organic architecture.

[86] The British architectural writer Ian Nairn called the tower "the saddest case of an unrealized focus" because it was set back from the city's street grid and, thus, did not readily attract passersby's attention.

[280] Although Paul Goldberger wrote that the Price Tower was "full of Wright's tense, energetic desire to break out of the box", he felt that it was not "a major building of the twentieth century" because it had languished as an unfinished project for too long.

[281] Jane Holtz Kay of The Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1983 that Wright had not been properly recognized for his work, even though the Price Tower and his other designs "make him a model for architecture's latest high-rise hipsters".

[236][256] Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, reviewing the hotel rooms, felt them to be "an exemplary exercise in the art of respectful contrast" despite the cramped spaces.

[90] In 2008, the U.S. National Park Service submitted the Price Tower, along with nine other Frank Lloyd Wright properties,[291] to a tentative list for World Heritage status.

[295][296] UNESCO ultimately added eight properties to the World Heritage List in July 2019 under the title "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright"; the Price Tower was not one of them.

[295][297] After the building was announced, models of it were displayed at Tulsa's Petroleum Exposition,[225] Bartlesville's First National Bank,[298] New York City's American Academy of Arts and Letters,[229] and the Guggenheim Museum during 1953 alone.

[308] Wright's unfinished design for The Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper, was loosely derived from the cantilevered structure of the Price Tower and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel.