The day before the online auction was supposed to begin, it was postponed yet again, this time seemingly indefinitely. Frank Lloyd Wright points to a model of Price Tower in The foot building in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is the only Wright-designed skyscraper ever realized. When the H. In , the Price company relocated to Dallas and sold the tower to Bartlesville-based oil company Phillips Petroleum, which used it for storage until , when it donated the building to a newly formed nonprofit known as the Price Tower Arts Center.
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 fruitionβa move that in hindsight should have been a clear indication that the consortium was overreaching. In the years between then and , the nonprofit struggled to fund regular operations as well as necessary building maintenance and upgrades.
It was designated a National Historic Landmark in At the time, Ms. 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. In a 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.
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.
For now, the building is closed up, with all former tenants forced to vacate, existing property employees laid off, and utilities shut off. 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 have been 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.
