History

Tulsa’s position as the “Oil Capital of the World” during the 1920s produced an unusual concentration of architectural investment in a small southwestern city. The discovery of oil in the surrounding region — beginning with the 1905 Glenn Pool strike and accelerating through the 1920s as Tulsa became the administrative center for the midcontinent oil industry — made the city extraordinarily wealthy by American standards for a city of its size. Oil executives, lawyers, and the fraternal organizations they joined all commissioned buildings that expressed this wealth in the dominant idiom of American commercial architecture in the late 1920s and early 1930s: Art Deco.

The Knights of Pythias, a national fraternal organization founded in 1864, commissioned Edward W. Saunders to design their Tulsa lodge building at the opening of the 1930s. Saunders delivered a design that deployed the Zig Zag Art Deco vocabulary — the most geometric, most ornament-intensive branch of the American Art Deco tradition — across the building’s entire exterior and public interior. The commission was completed in 1931 as the broader construction market was collapsing under the Depression, making it among the last of Tulsa’s oil-boom-funded buildings to be realized at full ambition. The building was subsequently known as the Gillette-Tyrrell Building after later commercial tenants. It was listed on the National Register in 1982 and became a contributing property to the larger Oil Capital Historic District when that district was established in 2010.