The Plan to Save Frank Lloyd Wright’s Only Skyscraper Isn’t Going as Planned

Less than two years ago, the building was thought to have been rescued from financial woes. Now the new owners have it on the auction block and some Wright-designed furnishings have already been sold.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper is just 19 stories, but even 70 years after it was built, Price Tower sits higher than most buildings in Bartlesville, Okla., and the view from the top still stretches to the horizon where the rolling prairie starts to take shape.

The tower is a landmark in Bartlesville, and a rarity in the architect’s portfolio. Designed by Wright to resemble a tree, with green, oxidized copper paneling, it’s featured on a mural nearby that depicts bison, an oil well and other anchors of the city’s heritage.

But the tower is now in trouble.

Once a buzzy hub of business life, and briefly occupied by Phillips Petroleum, the oil company that has long called Bartlesville home, it has struggled for many years to find an anchor tenant. It was reinvented as a nonprofit arts center in 2001 and soon added a boutique hotel and restaurant, but its major benefactor, the former Phillips chief executive C.J. Silas, also known as Pete, died a decade ago.

Facing a financial crisis, the nonprofit organization turned last year to a married pair of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard, who presented a bold plan to revive Wright’s masterwork. They proposed that a group led by Ms. Blanchard would buy the building, renovate it and make it the launchpad for a rethinking of Bartlesville as “Silicon Ranch,” a new hub for technology start-ups drawn by Oklahoma’s lower cost of living.