From the Los Angeles Times:
Critic's Notebook: Hollywood landmark at a crossroads
New York developers are reviving plans to surround the Capitol Records building with a mixed-use project covering 1 million square feet. Whether it would enhance or detract from the iconic structure depends on fuzzy details.
REVISED SKYLINE: This rendering shows a view of the proposed development from the north, but many details have to be ironed out. (Handel Architects)
By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
May 29, 2011
When it opened in 1956, the Capitol Records building was surrounded mostly by surface parking lots, making it easy to spot from the nearby — and brand-new — Hollywood Freeway. The cylindrical design for the building, by Welton Becket and a young architect in Becket's office, Louis Naidorf, played beautifully to its mobile audience and that wide-open urban landscape. The result was a 13-story tower with the confidence and allure of a major skyscraper.
Hollywood has changed a great deal in the intervening years: Along with a stretch of subway and a more crowded skyline, it has acquired a freshly scrubbed civic reputation. But Becket's tower, on Vine Street just north of Hollywood Boulevard, relates to its peculiar context pretty much as it always has. Many of its immediate neighbors are still surface parking lots, and when you see the building from the freeway you get the same instant sense that you've arrived in Hollywood. Viewed from the south, meanwhile, Capitol Records is even more prominent, framed against a postcard-ready backdrop of the freeway, the hills and the Hollywood sign.
Even in Los Angeles, though, open space is not eternal. Neither are parking lots, however hardy some of them have proved as urban specimens in this city. As if to symbolize all the ways that L.A. is changing as it grows denser, slowly and haphazardly filling in its empty urban pockets, this month a pair of New York developers, Millennium Partners and Argent Ventures, announced they are reviving a proposal to surround the Capitol Records building with a mixed-use project covering roughly 1 million square feet. The plan had been slowed but not completely derailed by the recession.
Working with New York architect Gary Handel and L.A. architect William Roschen, the developers hope to create something of an urban village on both sides of Vine. Becket's tower would be the centerpiece of the 4.5-acre project, which may also include a boutique hotel, rental apartments, condos, office space and a substantial amount of retail.
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