Archinect - News

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.

Post-Pizza Hut: photo series looks at how new businesses adapt to that iconic red roof

2015-10-05T12:49:00-04:00

A New Zealand man has set out to document and photograph former Pizza Hut locations across the planet, specifically looking for the pizza chain’s dine-in locations with the familiar red roof. [...] “The strangest thing may be the funeral homes or mortuaries. It's probably the last thing you'd expect to see a Pizza Hut become but there are several dotted around”