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Park Inn Hotel | |
 Front of the Historic Park Inn Hotel (right) and side of the City National Bank Building (left | |
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| Location | 15 W. State St. Mason City, Iowa |
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| Coordinates | 43°09′05.7″N 93°12′06″W / 43.151583°N 93.20167°W |
| Architect | Frank Lloyd Wright |
| Architectural style | Prairie School |
| Part of | Mason City Downtown Historic District (ID05000956) |
| NRHP reference No. | 72000470 |
| Added to NRHP | September 14, 1972 |
The Historic Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank are two adjacent commercial buildings located in downtown Mason City, Iowa, United States which were designed in the Prairie School style by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Completed in 1910, the Park Inn Hotel is the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world, of the six for which he was the architect of record. The City National Bank is one of only two remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed banks in the world. It was the first Frank Lloyd Wright-designed project in the state of Iowa, and today carries both major architectural and historical significance. In 1999, the Park Inn Hotel was named on the Iowa Historic Preservation Alliance's Most Endangered Properties List.[1]
The Park Inn Hotel was the third hotel designed by Wright and served as the prototype for Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, which was torn down in 1968.[2]
In 1907, when law partners James E. Blythe and J. E. E. Markley were looking for an architect to compete in quality with the eight-story bank building that would be built across the corner, they didn't hesitate to give the commission to Frank Lloyd Wright, a young architect who was building a reputation in the Chicago area. For them Wright would build a complex, multi-purpose building that would give them multiple income streams. Their law offices would be on the second floor of the building's narrower central waist and the hotel's east wing, surrounded on the south by a two-story banking room with rental office space above. On the north would be a 42-room hotel, with basement shops beneath the bank and hotel. Wright managed to pack all these functions into an aesthetically well-integrated building that architecturally would be the bridge between Wright's Prairie School period and his Midway Gardens and the Imperial Hotel to follow.
- ^ The Last Wright, a 2008 documentary film directed by Lucille Carra and produced and written by Carra and Garry McGee, traced the origins of the design of the Park Inn to Wright's first trip to Japan in 1905. The film documented the hotel's history from 1908 through Wright on the Park's ownership in 2008. It won the Grand Prize as best documentary from the Iowa Motion Picture Association in 2008 and received a Regional Midwest Emmy nomination for Best Documentary Writing in 2010. See The Last Wright at IMDb .
- ^ "Old Tokyo: Imperial Hotel (1923), Stephen Sundberg". Archived from the original on October 11, 2012.
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