United Founders Life Tower Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The United Founders Life Tower is exceptionally significant at the local level as a distinctive reaction against mainstream modernist/functional architecture, drawing inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower and the Seattle World's Fair Space Needle. It is a highly individual mid-twentieth century high-rise building that showcases a limited timeframe in which recent technological developments and the freedom to experiment in architecture gave rise to rare building forms and details, as exemplified in the folded plate roof system and unusual slender decagonal form of this tower, plus its cantilevered balconies. United Founders Life Tower is one of two unusual skyscrapers from this era in the city, the other being the Citizens Bank Tower (NRIS #09000978). This was the first modem tall building of distinction in the State of Oklahoma since the 1955 Price Tower (NRIS #74001670) and is one of only two circular tall buildings in the state. The unusual form of this building responds very well to its relatively isolated location at one of the highest elevations in the region, highly visible from nearby freeways and from nearly Lake Hefner. It helped to catalyze the development of the northwest side of Oklahoma City and facilitated the development of other high-rise buildings in the vicinity. United Founders Life Tower was a singular work of an architectural firm of regional renown and it displays innovative framing techniques as well as being an early example of design-build construction.