PIZZA PIE IN THE SKY
By STEPHEN MADDEN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you intend to build a cantilevered 30-story building to house your pizza company's operations, you'd better expect people to call it the Leaning Tower of Pizza. Especially if the structure tilts at a vertigo-inducing angle of 15 degrees (the real Leaning Tower lists 5.2 degrees). Such are the plans for the new structure that Thomas Monaghan, 51, chairman of Domino's Pizza, recently announced for Domino's Farms, the company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Construction should begin in early 1990. When the building is completed, it will be the gem -- or the scourge -- of the Ann Arbor skyline, depending on your taste in leaning towers. Monaghan's edifice complex goes back a long way. He was studying architecture when he opened his first pizza joint. ''I thought pizzas would pay for school,'' he says. Now Domino's Farms houses the Center for the Study of Frank Lloyd Wright, a repository of the architect's drawings and books. Monaghan owns three Wright buildings and hundreds of pieces of furniture designed by the man who was his childhood hero. He had hoped to construct Wright's unbuilt Golden Beacon skyscraper for his new headquarters, but the 56-story structure would have interfered with air traffic at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Colored window glass will form bright streaks down the new tower's sides. The building conforms to all zoning codes, and Monaghan claims that it will be structurally sound. So why is he putting a chapel on top? Says Monaghan: ''We can go up there to pray that the building won't fall down. But if it does, it will hit my office.'' Now there's a CEO into risk sharing.