(b Wallingford, PA, Nov 1861; d Rose Valley, PA, 15 Oct 1916). American architect, writer and designer. He was born into a Quaker family and trained in Quaker schools, also studying architecture in the office of Quaker Addison Hutton (1834–1916). By 1900 Price had been influenced by the utopian American economist Henry George (1839–97) and William Morris; Price formed utopian communities, such as a colony at Arden (1896), DE, in which a single tax was levied on land, and an Arts and Crafts commune at Rose Valley (1901), PA, where he lived until his death. There he developed a regional domestic architectural style that incorporated stucco, local stone and tile in gable-roofed houses and that evoked the local agrarian architecture, but with an abstract directness resulting from the merger of modern form with traditional materials. At the same time in 1903 Price formed a partnership with M. Hawley McLanahan (1865–1929) and designed the great reinforced concrete buildings for which he is remembered. These began with the six-storey, Byzantine Revival Jacob Reed’s Sons Store (1903), 1424 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and continued with the splendid domed reinforced concrete hotels, the Blenheim (1905) and the Traymore (1906–12; both destr.) in Atlantic City, NJ. With these buildings, Price established a national reputation that brought him commissions from Florida to the Midwest and demonstrated the validity of merging traditional 19th-century expression of function with 20th-century methods of construction. All Price’s great hotels and his railway stations, such as the Chicago Freight Terminal (1914–19), were demolished by the last quarter of the 20th century, leaving the Rose Valley community as his principal monument.

• Price, William L(ightfoot) (1861-1916)
  • Furness, Frank, §2: Influence
  • Philadelphia, §1(iv): Renewal in the 20th century
  • collaboration
    • Hotel, §1: Before 1900
  • groups and movements
    • Arts and Crafts Movement, §4: USA