The owner of one of only two office towers designed by Frank Lloyd Wright wants to sell the 19-story building in an auction, while a nonprofit group that holds an easement on the Oklahoma building is trying to block the sale of Wright-designed items inside the structure.

Copper Tree, an investor and consultant for buying and preserving historic properties, listed Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, on Ten-X, an online auction platform owned by CoStar Group. The three-day auction will begin on Oct. 7 with a $600,000 starting price.

Copper Tree, based in Bartlesville, acquired Price Tower in 2023, and reports say the amount of the token fee could be as low as $10 and planned a renovation into an upscale hotel and restaurant. Media reports note that Copper Tree accumulated debt in preparing for the renovation, and the group later decided to sell the building.

Copper Tree referred CoStar News to media interviews the owner, Cynthia Blanchard, has given. She explained to the Times of London that she's interested in preserving property and wanted to try to preserve a historic building, though with limited property experience she couldn't see all the challenges that could emerge.

“The challenges came when they would find things that we didn’t know about, and even the board" from the arts center "and the executive director didn’t know anything about it,” Blanchard told the Times.

Copper Tree has since sold some Wright-designed furniture and artwork created specifically for the building, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. She told the Times that it's been a frustrating situation because the Phillips owners had disposed of many original furnishings with the non-profit five years ago selling “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of materials and the conservancy hadn't protested.

“It’s been tough,” she told the paper. “There’s been a lot of sacrifice. And, you know, there’s no ‘woe is me’. I made the choice to step up and try to help this community. And I take full responsibility. And I’m actually proud of what we’ve tried to do. Even if it’s misjudged.”

The nonprofit group holds a preservation easement on Price Tower, and the group says it’s seeking to enforce the easement to block the sale of Wright-designed items contained within the building and recover items already sold, even as Blanchard argues that some sales took place before she was involved. The Conservancy also hopes to encourage potential buyers who are interested in preserving the structure.

A Dallas-based dealer of mid-century modern design products acquired a number of items from inside Price Tower, according to the Conservancy. Those include a directory of the building's tenants set on a wooden rolling cart, architectural copper relief panels, an armchair and copper tables and stools.

Bartlesville businessman Harold Price commissioned Wright to design the tower as the headquarters for his oil and gas pipeline company, and it opened in 1952. Price Tower has most recently been used as a hotel and for offices.

Price Tower is one of two Wright-designed buildings with a vertical orientation, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, a nonprofit organization that's separate from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The other is a 14-story tower at the S.C. Johnson & Co. office complex in Racine, Wisconsin. The Johnson company now uses the tower as a museum.

Price Tower is designed with four elevator shafts that are anchored by a deep central foundation, with the shafts serving as the support structure for the cantilevered concrete floors, according to the Foundation. The exterior walls were not designed to serve a load-bearing function but instead are used as ornamental screens for copper engravings and gold-tinted glass.

Scott Schlotfelt, managing director at Cushman & Wakefield/Commercial Oklahoma, is leading the auction sale.

(This story was updated on Aug. 28 to add comments from the owner.)