Unspecified/General

Rising over the Hollywood neighbourhood just north of the Hollywood and Vine intersection, the Capitol Records Building is a thirteen-storey tower widely described as the world's first circular office building. It was designed by the young architect Louis Naidorf of Welton Becket and Associates and completed in 1956, shortly after the British company EMI bought Capitol Records and consolidated the label's West Coast operations on the site. Its resemblance to a stack of records topped by a phonograph needle is the building's most repeated story, and also a coincidence. Naidorf has said he did not know who the client was when he drew the round plan, which was chosen mainly because a circular floor gave more usable, equal-sized offices and cut construction and cooling costs. The label's president initially disliked the look, fearing it resembled a cheap advertising gimmick, before being persuaded to keep it. The tower's 90-foot spire carries a beacon that has blinked the word Hollywood in Morse code, more or less continuously, since the building opened, a detail few passers-by notice. Inside, below ground, sit the Capitol Studios recording rooms and a set of subterranean echo chambers prized by engineers for their natural reverberation and used on countless records over the decades. A large mural on the rear wall depicts figures from the history of jazz. The building is not a museum and is not generally open for public tours, so for visitors it functions mainly as a landmark to see from the street, often paired with the nearby Walk of Fame and the Pantages Theatre. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, and its silhouette has become so tied to the city that it appears regularly in films, frequently as visual shorthand for Hollywood itself. The ground-floor lobby, when accessible, displays gold and platinum records and memorabilia from the label's catalogue, though access depends on events and security. The tower has appeared in disaster films and music videos, occasionally standing in for a generic skyscraper, and it remains a working office and studio rather than a tourist stop. Photographers tend to shoot it from the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where its full circular profile reads most clearly.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 1750 North Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Opening Date: 01/04/1956