BROOKVILLE, N.Y.- William B. Tabler Sr., an architect famous for designing Hilton hotels such as the 46-story New York Hilton near Rockefeller Center, died at 89. His son William B. Tabler Jr., will continue the architectural practice in Manhattan. Mr. Tabler’s designs traded charm for efficiency affecting generations of travelers after World War II. Mr. Tabler’s distinguished 12-story Washington Hilton of 1965, was designed to permit all of the 1,250 guest rooms to face outside, rather than having some overlook courtyards. More than half of the hotel’s floor area, including the ballroom, was built below ground so that it would conform to Washington’s strict height limit. The 1,200-room Hilton in San Francisco, built near Union Square in 1964, was called a motel within a hotel because Mr. Tabler’s design allowed guests to drive their cars up ramps through the core of the building to park on the same floor as their rooms. On the exterior, windows alternated with structural panels, creating a kind of checkerboard facade that masked the X-shaped braces providing earthquake resistance.

Mr. Tabler was born in Momence, Illinois, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard. In 1939 he joined the Chicago firm Holabird & Root, where he worked on his first big hotel project, the 1,000-room Statler Hotel in Washington. After serving in the Navy during the Second World War, he was asked to head Statler’s in-house architecture department in 1946. He formed his own practice in 1955. He designed more than 400 hotels. Among his recent projects were the 376-room New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, 333 Adams Street in Brooklyn, which opened in 1998, and the 714-room Grand Hyatt Cairo, which opened in 2000. Mr. Tabler designed Hilton hotels in Baltimore, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Paul; Statler hotels in Dallas and Hartford; and InterContinental hotels worldwide.