Note: This is an update to our previous article to provide context to the ongoing saga of the sale of Wright’s only Skyscraper, Price Tower, which is embroiled in legal battles.
In early August 2024, The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the foundation tasked with protecting the work of one of America’s most famous architects, stated that it intended to file a lawsuit against the current owners of his iconic Price Tower, the only skyscraper Wright ever designed, improbably built in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Their assertion? That the owners, assembled under the name Green Copper Holdings, had begun selling off protected items from the building to a Texas-based dealer of mid-century furnishings and art without its consent.
Green Copper Holdings has since put the property on the market, originally at an asking price of $600,000 with an expectation that it would sell for around $4 million. An auction, announced for early October 2024 has been postponed to mid-November because on September 27, 2024, historical building revitalization firm, The McFarlin Building Company, sued Copper Tree, Inc. and Green Copper Holdings, LLC. McFarlin alleges that they entered into a valid contract with Green Copper to purchase the building for $1.4 million in May, but that the sellers had improperly backed out of the sale. The suit seeks to compel Green Copper to complete the sale.
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In the midst of all the swirling sales and legal talk, Green Copper convinced the Conservancy to drop its lawsuit and pursue an out-of-court settlement. The tower’s owners pledged to stop selling easement-protected items and to work in good faith to make sure any potential sale included informing interested parties about the easement, which is transferrable, meaning it can be legally binding regardless of the building’s ownership.
Then, in late October, Green Copper Holdings principal owner, Cynthia Blanchard, filed a $75,000 lawsuit against The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, arguing that its easement prohibiting them from “sell[ing] easement-protected items without their consent” to preserve the site’s historic integrity, is “null and void.”
The Conservancy “strongly objects to the baseless claims of the lawsuit filed against it on October 21, 2024, and stands by the terms of its easement,” according to a statement published on its website.
“The Conservancy will respond to the allegations in the lawsuit filed by Green Copper and intends to seek enforcement of the legally binding easement. The Conservancy remains committed to preserving the Price Tower and the easement-protected items from the collection and ensuring that the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his creation in Bartlesville endures.”
McFarlin’s management – the company suing to force its previous sales agreement for $1.4 million – has stated its intent to plunge some $10 million into Price Tower to “preserve its architectural and operational integrity.” That statement seems to imply that McFarlin would have no issue abiding by the Conservancy’s easement.
Playing in the background of all this is the fact that Cynthia Blanchard’s spouse, Anthem Blanchard, previously the CEO of Anthem Holdings Co., is the subject of federal Securities and Exchange Commission charges, alleging his cryptocurrency fund defrauded investors for over $5 million. Several of those investors state they were promised a stake in Price Tower in an attempt to make them whole.
At this time, the November auction is slated only for the building and land itself. The art collection will be sold separately in what is being called “Phase 2” of the sale, in a press release by broker Scott Schlotfelt for Ten-X Commercial Real Estate & Auction, as reported by the local newspaper, the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise. The art sale could, potentially, also fly in the face of the Conservancy’s easement.
Regardless of the legal wrangling, one thing is certain from Price Tower’s beleaguered ownership history; location is everything – even when the building itself is a work of art – and it remains unclear whether Wright’s enduring architectural legacy will outweigh the practicalities of maintaining his vision nestled in a small town in the plains.
As GPRS Company’s Existing Conditions President, Jared Curtis, said of the building, “Adaptive reuse or significant investment in Price Tower is objectively less viable compared to many other properties in more strategically positioned urban centers. Unfortunately, regardless of its architectural significance, this results in the possibility of demolition because its location in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is economically and geographically challenging.”
