How the architect behind Pizza Hut's iconic roof turned a tiny design fee into a small fortune

2022-07-11T17:50:00-04:00

“As the story goes, Burke had originally charged the brothers a hefty upfront fee that the fledgling pizza start-up wasn’t able to scrape together,” the company wrote in a 2015 blog post. “Instead, they offered Burke $100 per store built using his design, never guessing that Pizza Hut would become the global company that it is today.”

Contemporary licensing agreements between architects and chains like the Hut are typically undisclosed, but the low price commanded for each meant that, for all their liminally-pleasurable aesthetic, the otherwise unknown designer of the "red roof" restaurants, Richard D. Burke, might have raked in a small fortune for the services he rendered overtime since the late 1960s (the real number remains unclear, but Curbed once put the number of built units of his design that still existed by 2004 at around 6,300).

The sometimes odd reuses of Burke’s reportedly $100 apizza (forgive me) creations have been well-documented by bloggers since the beginning of the 2010s and brought about a death knell for over 300 former locations as well as many of the iconic red-tiled roofs that came along with their original designs. Yum! Brands, which now operates Pizza Hut, began shifting away from the model and towards a more modernized look in mid-decade.

After delays, the pizza-slice-shaped windows on the Little Caesars headquarters in Detroit are almost complete

2019-08-15T19:00:00-04:00

After a year's delay, construction crews Monday were installing the final glass panels in on the upper floors of the new Little Caesars headquarters on Woodward Avenue near the Fox Theatre. Originally expected to be opened last summer, the building was delayed over an apparent problem with the unique pizza-slice wedges of glass that form the facade.

The SmithGroup-designed Little Caesar's headquarters in Detroit is finally continuing its construction progress, nearly a year after hiccups with the tower's pizza-shaped window installation delayed the project's completion.

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How the architect behind Pizza Hut's iconic roof turned a tiny design fee into a small fortune

After delays, the pizza-slice-shaped windows on the Little Caesars headquarters in Detroit are almost complete