Capitol Records Tower

The Capitol Records Tower, completed in 1956 and designed by architect Welton Becket, is one of the most recognisable buildings in American music history: a thirteen-storey circular stack of floors rising from Hollywood's intersection of Vine Street and Capitol Records Drive, its profile suggesting — by coincidence, Capitol executives always insisted — a stack of records on a turntable. A beacon on the spire blinks the word "Hollywood" in Morse code, as it has since the building opened. The recording studios beneath it, cut into the bedrock below street level, are among the most historically significant in the world.

The basement studios — A, B, and C — were constructed with custom echo chambers built even deeper underground: cavernous concrete rooms connected to the recording spaces by pipes, giving Capitol's recordings a reverb signature that was technically unreplicable anywhere else. Frank Sinatra recorded most of his Capitol albums in Studio A in the late 1950s, including In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers!, and Only the Lonely — the creative peak of his career, made in a room he considered his second home. Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Judy Garland recorded here. The Beach Boys. Radiohead. Katy Perry. The studios have been in more or less continuous use since they opened.

The building was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2006, protecting it from demolition in the face of development pressure from surrounding blocks. A large mural of jazz figures adorns one exterior wall. Standing on the corner of Vine and Capitol Records Drive looking up at the circular silhouette against the Hollywood sky, it is easy to understand why the building became a symbol of an entire industry and an entire era.