Retooling The Hit Factory

Retooling the Hit FactoryBy Kitschy Hollywood standards, it's an architectural land-mark—a round building 13 stories high that looks like a stack of records with a needle on top. True, that wasn't the intent of architect Welton Becket, designer of the Cairo Hilton, when Capitol Tower opened in 1956. Instead, he claimed he was looking for "economy of construction, operation and maintenance, plus maximum utilization of space." Round buildings, or so it seemed at the time, were the coming...