Week 9

This week, you might be surprised to learn that I am focusing on a skyscraper—Wright’s one and only. Most architects traditionally earn their fame from designing skyscrapers—like Wright’s own mentor, the “father of the skyscraper” himself, Louis Sullivan, acclaimed for creating Chicago’s skyline. However, Wright, America’s most famous architect, atypically rose to prominence primarily from his residential commissions, with a few public buildings rounding out his oeuvre. As an anomaly, the Price Tower is all the more intriguing. What convinced Wright, who abhorred the vertical excess of urban architecture (as his spiral Guggenheim Museum elegantly defied in Manhattan), to cast aside his architectural aversion and embrace the challenge of constructing a free-standing skyscraper?

The answer remains a mystery. Perhaps it was the lingering ambition to finally construct an unused pre-Depression design that he had made for the St. Mark’s Tower complex in New York—which, if built, would have been the first entirely glass building in New York. Seen in this light, Wright’s abrupt reversal might not seem so out of character: indeed, he was constantly evolving, even daring later to conjure up a mile-high building for Chicago that never was realized either (“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten Plans for New York’s First All-Glass Towers”).

Thus, in the early 1950s, we find Wright, someone who claimed to be averse to tall buildings, even describing one skyscraper as an “incongruous mantrap of monstrous dimensions,” uncharacteristically persuading Harold C. Price to transform his simple office commission into a 19-floor tower stretching up 67 feet into the sky (The Atlantic, pricetower.org).

Price Tower stands today as a testament to Wright, an iconoclast who rebelled not only against society, but also against himself. 

Source: Bluffton.edu

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PRICE TOWER

Located in the small city of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Wright built this one-of-a-kind skyscraper from 1953 to 1956 as the headquarters of the Price pipeline construction company. However, Wright’s Usonian experience had taught Wright the importance of being economical; so he decided to design rentable apartment spaces for offices and residences in order to bring in extra revenue for the Price Company (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

As discussed above, Wright had designed skyscrapers before when commissioned to build a St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery cluster of apartment buildings in New York City; however, the reduced housing demand during the Great Depression left the plans unbuilt. Price Tower’s unique structure is actually borrowed from the radial design of one of these NYC apartment complexes (pricetower.org).

Source: architizer.com

Thus, Wright termed Price Tower “The Tree that Escaped the Crowded Forest” because the innovative design no longer had to be hidden among the clustered skyscrapers in New York City; it could now take its place in the spotlight to “cast its own shadow upon its own piece of land,” in the words of Wright. At the time construction was completed in 1956, Price Tower was by far the tallest building in Bartlesville (pricetower.org).

Source: greencountryvillage.com

This nickname, however, not only described the building’s location, but also highlighted the tower’s tree-based biomimetic structure. The four elevator shafts at the center of the building represent the trunk of the tree while the tower’s nineteen cantilevered floors taper out from the trunk like tree branches. The artificially-patinated copper exterior and sun-louvers imitate leaves, giving Price Tower its distinctive, tree-like green color. These louvers are not only like leaves in color, but in function; they help shade the predominately glass building from the scorching Oklahoma sun (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Source: peterbeers.net

Likewise, the building’s top is narrower than its bottom—the top three floors get successively smaller to peak at the one-room penthouse floor—just as a tree’s trunk is thicker than its branches (pricetower.org). The trunk of the building provides more than just structural support; it symbolically unifies the building by integrating the various vertical and horizontal sections into a harmonious whole, just as a tree trunk grounds the winding branches (Architecture Daily).

All floor slabs are cantilevers anchored to four vertical shafts made of reinforced concrete. This affords the exterior walls to be comprised almost entirely of glass windows, even at the corners, needing only a parapet for support (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Additionally, the “lines and divisions” of the tower—a design derived from the Price Company’s logo—help divide the space on each floor to create an innovative organization of rooms that bucked the traditions of regular office towers at the time. This organization necessitated a rotation of the axes of each floor by 45 degrees to create four quadrants. Three quadrants contained offices; the fourth, residences for rent (Architecture Daily). The office quadrants are marked by the horizontally-arranged copper louvers, while the residential quadrant is bounded by vertically-arranged louvers (“National Historic Landmark Nomination: Price Tower”).

Source: Pinterest 

This quadrant design led the interior of the building to be constructed on a parallelogram grid, which consisted of four 30-60-90 degree triangles centered around the bronze Price Company logo imprinted in the center of each floor. This grid dictates all aspects of the tower, from the furniture to the lighting. This grid system arguably seems inspired by Bartlesville’s orthogonal grid pattern (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

To visually connect the interior and exterior of the building, Wright used the same materials on the outside and inside of the building, including copper panels, concrete, and aluminum (pricetower.org). All of the exterior doors and window frames are constructed from aluminum; the exterior lighting, patinated copper (National Historic Landmark Nomination: Price Tower). In conjunction with the wide glass windows, this connection draw the eye outward, imploring those inside to explore nature—even though the tower was practically self-sufficient by uniting work and living spaces (pricetower.org).

Like all of Wright’s buildings, a geometric motif dominates the imagery. Triangles take center stage in Price Tower—from triangular columns to triangular lighting fixtures to triangular ventilation grills. Upon first entering the lobby, visitors meet a “distinctive disposition of planes (based on triangular or “flattened pyramidal” forms) that are repeated throughout the building” (National Historic Landmark Nomination: Price Tower). Many of the decorative accents in the building also featured triangles; a triangular glass and mirror mural by Eugene Masselink hung in the office of H.C. Price and a geometric wall mural was placed in Price’s apartment (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”). Wright claimed that had a strong affinity for the triangle “because it allows flexibility of arrangement for human movement not afforded by the rectangle” (The Atlantic).

Source: Wrightontheweb.net

Source: doi.gov

Price Tower, which Wright described as “an assertion of the American sense of itself,” blended modern and natural ideas—pairing the modern fluting, hexagonal form, and cantilevers with the basic tree structure. Exemplifying the late-19th and early-20th Century concept of Gesamtkunstwerk stressing that interiors and everything inside them should be a “total work of art,” the interplay of interiors and objects in Price Tower reveal Wright’s call for “the integrity of each in all and all in each” (National Historic Landmark Nomination: Price Tower).   

After the Price Company moved its headquarters, the Price Tower Arts Center took control of the building, converting the first two stories of the building into art galleries and reception areas, while much of the rest of the building became a hotel (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

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BOTANICAL BIOMIMETICS

Source: wyss.harvard.edu

Last week, I argued that the Guggenheim Museum was a precursor to the contemporary biomimetic movement in architecture, adopting animal adaptations to architecture. This week, Wright’s tree-inspired Price Tower strengthens the biomimetic connection, validating his position in the vanguard of today’s biomimetic design revolution. Indeed, the trajectory from Wright’s nature-based design beginning with his Prairie Houses' stained-glass windows seems to point inexorably to present-day biomimetic architecture.

In the shadow of Price Tower, biomimetic architecture continued to plumb nature’s rich repository of evolutionary adaptations and competitive advantages in the realm of the plant world. 

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CONTEMPORARY BIOMIMETIC DESIGN

Nature is the consummate producer of prototypes, which have been tried and tested by eons of evolution. However, transforming these nano-sized, organic innovations into macro, artificial buildings uses nature as only a starting point, not a carbon copy of the finished product.

Here are some exciting examples. Can you find Wright’s footprint in these plans?

One example of modern biomimetic architecture inspired by a tree is White Tree, which was designed by a Japanese architecture firm and two French companies. Like Price Tower, it is multi-functional, including housing, restaurants, an art gallery, and office space. The walls, floors, and terraces of the building are all asymmetrical and permeable, similar to the branches on a tree (Seriouswonder.com).

Source: Seriouswonder.com

Likewise, the design for photovoltaic systems, which collect solar energy, sprang from the tree leaves’ process of taking in sunlight. Photovoltaic systems are water-gel-based, just like leaves, that combine plant chlorophyll and carbon to create a more effective solar panel. Researchers currently strive to create an even more energy efficient and biomimetic structure (Whole Building Design Guide).

Source: Whole Building Design Guide

Another leaf-based innovation has made its way into solar cells to increase their longevity. Leaves have the ability to repair themselves when damaged by ultraviolet light by dividing into more cells to replace the ones lost. A typical solar cell, however, cannot do the same. But scientists have discovered how to imitate the cell process of leaves in solar cells using proteins, bacteria, and water (Web Ecoist).

The Habitat 2020 building uses the idea of opening and closing pores of leaves to allow the building to breathe, with the small openings opening and closing throughout the day to let light, air, and water into the apartments. This semi-permeable membrane improves air quality and acts as natural air conditioning, cutting down on electricity cost and energy usage. The building’s skin even has the ability to collect and purify rainwater to be used in the building (Web Ecoist).

Source: Web Ecoist

In La Pineda, Spain, a seaside park features a biomimetic shading structure that imitates how pine trees sway in the wind. Even built at the same angle as the nearby pine trees, the salt-resistant fiberglass structure provides the perfect shade from both the sun and wind (“Web Ecoist”).

Source: Web Ecoist

In the arid deserts of Qatar, however, a tree does not seem fitting inspiration for a building. Instead, the new office building for the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture mimics a cactus—both in structure and in function. The building is covered with sun shades that open to let in air and light and close to keep out heat, just like how cacti retain water to survive long periods of drought ("Web Ecoist").

Source: "Web Ecoist"

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LESSON PLAN

In this lesson, students will start by learning about Wright’s tree-inspired Price Tower and then further explore examples of biomimetic architecture, particularly buildings inspired by adaptations of trees and other plants. Students will ultimately design their own biomimetic building based on a plant’s micro- and macro-properties suitable for specific climates. 

Source: dbu.de

Source: Royal Society Publishing