Although Richard and Maurice McDonald only held on to their hamburger empire for 21 years (selling out to Ray Kroc in 1961), the brothers not only laid the groundwork for global fast food but pioneered the idea of architecture as signage. The first McDonald’s restaurant to showcase the Golden Arches was their second restaurant, located in San Bernadino and designed by local architect Stanley Clark Meston, a specialist in the car-focused roadside architecture that proliferated in the 40s and 50s.
McDonald's Golden Arches
A McDonald's restaurant on Interstate 90 in Rapid City, South Dakota, 1970
Working closely with Richard McDonald, who suggested the idea of the towering twin arches, Meston’s assistant Charles Fish rendered the forms not as simple curves but as structural parabolas, a familiar form of the era with its roots in modernist concrete engineering.
It was employee Jim Schindler who translated these architectural forms into the extended ‘M’ logotype in 1962, with the signature yellow and red colours providing eye-catching contrast. As an architectural element, the arches lasted barely a decade into Kroc’s aggressive period of restaurant building, yet as a recognisable logotype it was unmatched and simply too good to ignore. Distilled into a single letter atop a pole or on the side of a building, the arches are a throwback to a forgotten era of cinematic, aspirational roadside architecture.
Today’s McDonald’s franchises are flat-packed structures that can be thrown up in 24 hours, not neon-lit Googie wonders that send mid-century buffs salivating. But on wrappers, cups and chip packets, the golden arches have been served up billions upon billions of times in the decades that followed their creation.