A short trip up to Oklahoma and beyond brought a look at two sites idyllic in the proliferation of America's auto culture. The first is....
A short trip up to Oklahoma and beyond brought a look at two sites idyllic in the proliferation of America's auto culture. The first is a Meadow Gold sign in Tulsa. The sign had been both a Tulsa and Route 66 icon since the 1930’s. Neglected and dark since the 1970s, the sign was slated to be torn down in 2004 by a car dealership. The owner agreed to donate the sign to the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture if it could remove and store the two 20-foot-by-40-foot panels. The Meadow Gold sign's new address isn't far away: the owner of an adjacent building donated land to the city of Tulsa for the sign's new home base. It was rededicated in 2009.

The second is the only realized skyscraper by Frank Lloyd Wright. More like a tall building, it is of course an urban form, and Wright was known to dislike the urban form. "To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor," he said. Well, this building is not in what most would call a city, it's in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price, for use as a corporate headquarters for his Bartlesville company. Wright nicknamed the Price Tower "the tree that escaped the crowded forest."

Strangely this Walt Whitman quote adorns the lobby.

Toward All
I raise high the perpendicular hand-I make the signal
To remain after me in sight forever
For all the haunts and homes of men

Where the city of the faithfullest friends stands
Where thrift is in its place but prudence is in its place
Where behavior is the finest of the fine arts
Where outside authority enters always after the
precendence of inside authority
Where the city that has produced the greatest man stands
There the greatest city stands

Bartlesville seems to have its charms, but following the poem, just perhaps that's possible its not here.