Story Ideas
This section is to help generate story ideas for the media. For additional information, please visit our up-to-date press release section, explore the site for specific areas of interest, or contact the Director of Marketing & PR at 918.336.4949 ext. 119.
Price Tower - The Landmark Experience
Immerse yourself in this historic landmark by staying the night with Frank Lloyd Wright's only built skyscraper, dining alfresco at Copper Restaurant + Bar, touring the 1956 restored and original interiors, studying the vast museum collections through the interactive Architecture Study Center, and exploring the current modern or contemporary exhibitions in Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper. Price Tower Arts Center's mission is to provide great art, architecture and design to local, regional and global audiences in an arts complex whose centerpiece is Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, the Price Tower. It is the vision of the trustees and staff to integrate these components into an accessible setting for all ages to enjoy, learn and explore. This is an experience you won't soon forget!
Price Tower Restored - Ride the Elevator up to 1956
Recently restored to its 1956 appearance, Price Tower Arts Center offers daily tours of Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper, the Price Tower, and the historic interiors of the H.C. Price Company Executive Office Suite, Corporate Apartment and traditional office settings on floors 17 to19. After four years of research, conservation and restoration (2002 -2006) of the top three floors of Price Tower, tourists can now ride the elevator up to 1956 and experience this great achievement.
Modern and Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Oklahoma
Price Tower Arts Center is a "traditional" museum in a non-traditional setting, dedicated to providing local, regional, and global audiences with great art, architecture and design from the 20th and 21st centuries. The exploration of these three ideals and their intersection inside Frank Lloyd Wright's only built skyscraper creates a non-traditional feeling, as the audience is surrounded by the genius of Wright's angular multi-use skyscraper. The museum is "traditional" in the sense that it has over 13,000 objects in its collections and archives, with a burgeoning library of first edition books and magazines on architecture, design and art as they relate to the mission. Price Tower Arts Center reviews and adds works of art, architecture and design into their collection, as appropriate to their mission, through their curatorial staff and collections committee, as well as displays and interprets both their own permenant collections and temporary exhibitions of 20th and 21st Century works for the public to enjoy.
The collection includes works on paper, paintings, sculpture, furnishings, furniture, scale models, and more. Many items include works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, Dennis Oppenheim, Karim Rashid, Robert Indiana, and more.
State-of-the-Art Architecture Study Center Offer Museum Collections to the Public
Price Tower Arts Center successfully opened its new Architecture Study Center on October 13, 2006.
The Architecture Study Center, a state-of-the-art facility, houses two computer work stations, an architecture and design reference library, and flat file storage, and is located on the mezzanine of the Arts Center's galleries inside Price Tower. The collections accessible within the Study Center, as well as the entire Arts Center, comprise the core of Price Tower Arts Center's permanent collection (the murals, fixtures, and furnishings Wright designed specifically for the building). Other Wright-designed objects and furnishings round out the collection, as well as those from his contemporaries and associates.
Price Tower Arts Center also has significant holdings of architectural drawings, paintings, and other objects by internationally renowned architect Bruce Goff, who lived and worked in the Price Tower from 1956 to 1964. Also in development are a collection of contemporary art and design, by those artists, architects, and designers whose works address issues involving the blurring of boundaries between the three categories. In 2005, the Arts Center acquired forty architectural models by artist Dennis Oppenheim, and in 2006 acquired fifty objects by industrial designer Karim Rashid, including a large site-specific sculptural piece entitled, Blobjectory.
The collections also include works by artists David Salle and Robert Indiana, architects Wendy Evans Joseph and Zaha Hadid, and furniture designer Michael Wolfson, among others. To date, the rapidly growing architecture and design collections numbers nearly 3,000 significant objects with an estimated 8,000 archival pieces for a total of approximately 11,000 items for use by Architecture Study Center scholars. The Architecture Study Center will also serve as a clearing house for local and regional preservation activities in order to secure the long-term future of important local structures and to house documentation and objects related to them.
Price Tower Arts Center has formed a number of partnerships with educational and professional groups around the region and across the US in order to identify constituencies and their needs to better utilize the Study Center and its resources. They envision resident scholars and fellows to be able to stay the night with Frank Lloyd Wright while studying the resources and collections.
The Study Center is expected to grow in its programming over the next few years. It will be a vigorous and vital program, eventually including master classes, lectures, exhibitions, and research opportunities that will bring to Oklahoma the great minds in the fields of art, architecture, and design practice, history, and criticism. The program will also include fellowships and residencies by university faculty and graduate students as well as short-term internships. These activities are intended to provide for an energetic and creative dialogue between outside scholars and citizens of Bartlesville, the Tulsa region, the state of Oklahoma, and the central United States.
It is open to the public Tuesday through Thursday 10am to 12pm and is also available by appointment.
The Architecture Study Center was made possible in part by inaugural funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, New York, with structural support by Borroughs Corporation, Ambler Architects, AFC, Herman Miller, and Knoll. Materials donated to the library were provided by Bill and Eileen Rudd, Charles Ward, Friends of Kebyar, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and Joyce and Dan O'Donnell. Additional support was provided by Joan Phillips and Deshane Atkins.
For more information on the Architecture Study Center, please contact Kay Johnson, Manager of Architecture Study Center/ Registrar at 918.336.4949 ext. 111 or visit the web at http://www.pricetower.org/education/architectural-study-center/
Inn at Price Tower Wins Acclaim with High-Design accommodations, Fine Cuisine -- and Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright
Imaginatively conceived and elegantly constructed within the top floors of Frank Lloyd 
Wright's only skyscraper, the high-design Inn at Price Tower welcomed its first guests in April 2003. Since then, it has become one of America's outstanding travel destinations. With its 19 luxurious rooms and Tower Suites and its spectacular two-story restaurant-bar, Copper, Inn at Price Tower has been recognized by Condé-Nast Traveler as one of the "Top 100 New Hotels," while winning the 2003 Business Week/Architectural Record "Good Design Is Good Business" award.
Created by Price Tower Arts Center as both an amenity for the museum and an attraction in its own right, Inn at Price Tower was designed by New York architect Wendy Evans Joseph. Working in dialogue with Frank Lloyd Wright's distinctive spaces, she created gracious and ample interiors that speak to his aesthetic while establishing a distinctly contemporary identity of their own. In the rooms, the Inn's guests discover a custom-crafted décor in which every detail contributes to the striking whole. At Copper, the Inn's restaurant-bar, they find the culmination of their experience, in a two-story glassed space that dramatically cantilevers over the Oklahoma prairie.
Special event and travel packages are available, such as a $195 landmark destination romantic getaway that includes a night at the Inn, Champaign and chocolates, two dinner entrees at Copper Restaurant + Bar and admission to the Price Tower Arts Center museum galleries for two.
Group visits are also possible at Inn at Price Tower and are becoming increasingly popular. Groups may even choose to block out all 19 rooms and suites for themselves, as well as renting Copper for a private breakfast, luncheon or dinner. Extended families, business conferences, wedding parties and "architourism" groups are just a few of those who have enjoyed the use of Inn at Price Tower.
"The creation of Inn at Price Tower truly springs from our mission as a museum of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. There are many, many people who long for the chance to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Well, here's a chance to stay in Wright's skyscraper, as reinterpreted on the interior by one of today's most exciting designers."
Reservations for Inn at Price Tower may be made at 1.877.424.2424 or visit the web site at www.innatpricetower.com.