Archinect - News

Chipotle launches new all-electric restaurant design pilot

2023-04-20T14:37:00-04:00

Chipotle Mexican Grill has unveiled a new fully electric restaurant design that aims to utilize 100% renewable energy and maximize energy efficiency in its equipment and systems.

The chain has recently opened restaurants with these new features in Gloucester, Virginia and Jacksonville, Florida, with a third location set to open later this summer in Castle Rock, Colorado. This design pilot will help the company progress towards its sustainability targets, formed in alignment with Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), to reduce direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.

Chipotle aims to have more than 100 of its new locations in 2024 utilize this new model. Its impact will be further extended as the company plans to eventually grow to 7,000 locations in North America. The design will continue to evolve as restaurants receive additional feedback and insights.

Key features of the new restaurant design include rooftop solar panels, all-electric...

The glory days of fast food architecture may be gone forever

2023-02-21T19:10:00-05:00

Goodbye bright colors and unusual shapes. Today, the design is minimal and sleek. Most fast-food restaurants are built to maximize efficiency, not catch motorists’ attention. One critic has called this trend “faux five-star restaurants” intended to make customers forget they are eating greasy fries and burgers. The chains now sport nearly identical looks. Call it the gentrification of fast-food design.

The psychologically manipulative color schemes may remain, but fast food’s once-iconic Googie and mid-century modern designs are quickly being swapped out for more monolith structures. Changes caused by the pandemic and technology are the largest factors, along with the rise in popularity of drive-thru-only chains.

If it goes on unabated, the America your children grow up in could become one vast dystopic warren of bland 5-over-1s, converted strip malls, Amazon fulfillment centers, these unhealthy slat facade Wendy’s stores, and the occasional mass timber luxury tower attainable exclusively to the very rich and well-connected.

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.

A historic McDonald's makeover in the heart of Moscow is Landini's latest innovative menu item

2022-01-12T17:00:00-05:00

One of the more underrated landmarks of 20th-century geopolitics has undergone a complete transformation into a mirrored elevation of the surrounding community thanks to the latest in a global series of innovative redesign projects from Landini Associates for McDonald’s.

To mark its 30th year of operation in the former Soviet capital of Moscow, McDonald’s asked the Australian-based firm to remake the historic Pushkin Square restaurant into a more modern and experimental space that would double as the company’s Russian flagship and the home of a special initiative called Project Ray.

Photography by Anton Voronkov

Named after founder Ray Kroc’s vision to create a respectful and quiet space for people to take a dignified break from the every day, the project’s brief has meant reimagining the restaurant as a service point in heavily trafficked urban environments in order to be more appealing to a millennial consumer base. This has brought new spaces from La...

New restaurant designs are betting big on drive-thrus to cope with pandemic

2020-12-04T13:54:00-05:00

The pandemic accelerated a need for digital menu boards, artificial intelligence, expanding drive-thrus into dual lanes and adding drive-thru only units where available. Many other fast food restaurants like Wendy's, Taco Bell, Del Taco, Burger King, KFC and McDonald's have also shown interest in developing many of these concepts.

With indoor dining areas closed in many, if not most, restaurants since the beginning of the pandemic, the nation's fast food and fast casual franchises are rethinking fundamental design concepts of their operations that will likely become part of the American vernacular for decades to come, such as AI-powered pickup-only stations with double or triple drive-thru lanes.

Burger King unveils new restaurant designs to address implications of COVID-19

2020-09-14T14:29:00-04:00

Burger King has unveiled new restaurant designs that are due to better serve customers in a COVID-19 world. With a focus on mobile ordering and curbside pick-up, the new designs embrace a new way of serving visitors by offering drive-in and walk-up order areas, curbside pick-up areas, an enhanced drive-thru experience, exterior dining spaces, and sustainable design elements.

The new design was created by Restaurant Brands International's in-house design team. "The designs we’ve created completely integrate restaurant functionality and technology. The restaurant of the tomorrow merges the best functional technology with unique modern design to elevate our Burger King guest experience,” said Rapha Abreu, Global Head of Design at Restaurant Brands International in a statement. “We designed the interior and exterior spaces like we had a blank sheet of paper, designing without preconceived notions of how a Burger King restaurant should look."

Turns out the U.S. has more museums than the combined number of Starbucks and McDonalds

2015-03-26T13:27:00-04:00

There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. But combined, the two chains don't come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000. So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. [...] the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.

China’s “fast food homes” were built quickly and cheaply, and they’re starting to collapse

2014-04-07T14:28:00-04:00

The collapse of a five-story building in the city of Fenghua trapped at least six people, one of whom has died so far, according to state media (in Chinese). The apartment building was built in 1994—part of a nationwide boom in the 1980s and ‘90s that packed the Chinese real estate market with substandard, shoddily built buildings. Authorities are warning that the poor quality of buildings from the those decades could represent huge dangers in coming years.