McDonald’s new flagship decked in green
Behold the new McDonald’s flagship in Chicago!
This temple of the Big Mac is billed as a model of energy-saving architecture — sustainability! It’s supposed to bring people together — community! It even aims to be visually subtle, which amounts to a revolution for a company whose stores, once decked out in ketchup red and mustard yellow, blighted America’s highways and byways.
“I defy you to find another McDonald’s on Earth as beautiful as this one,” downtown alderman Brendan Reilly said at Wednesday’s press preview.
That’s a lot of hype to live up to, and the flagship restaurant that opened to the public Thursday doesn’t always deliver.
The building, a white pavilion with pencil-thin steel columns, environmentally friendly timber and an array of 1,062 rooftop solar panels, is architecturally adventurous — a big improvement on the supersized, backward-looking store it replaced. Its airy, plant-showcasing interior is miles better than the plastic-heavy McDonald’s of old. Yet the flagship’s outdoor plaza isn’t nearly as inviting as it should be. And its green credentials, while impressive, are undercut by the fact that it remains tied to the energy-wasting car culture.
I give this building, whose costs were largely shouldered by McDonald’s rather than franchise owner Nick Karavites, an “A” for effort and a “B” for execution. There are lots of good ideas bubbling here, but they’re not (excuse the restaurant metaphor) fully cooked.
Located on the block bounded by Ohio, Ontario, Clark and LaSalle streets, the McDonald’s occupies a strange spot in Chicago — a place I once dubbed “the blurbs” for the way its blurs the line between urban charm and the tacky suburban strip. The original McDonald’s on this site, a low-slung affair that opened in 1983, played a leading role in this visual cacophony.The new one, with a commendable push from McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook, looks forward.
For the architect, Chicago’s Carol Ross Barney, the company’s directive about “community” meant striking a new balance between cars and pedestrians. She sought to create an urban oasis where people could eat, drink and meet. On the site’s west side, she got McDonald’s to cut the amount of parking by about one-third. She increased the number of trees and shrubs. She replaced ugly asphalt with permeable concrete pavers that cover the site like a gray rug, giving it the feel of an urbane outdoor plaza. Even the drive-through lanes have those pavers, making them resemble a “shared street,” where pedestrians, bikes and cars have an equal claim to the road.
The building itself, which occupies the site’s east side, cleverly interprets McDonald’s desire to associate itself with environmental sustainability. In contrast to the sign-plastered, decoration-slathered eyesores around it, it relies on the essentials of architecture — columns and beams — to convey its message. The result is a shade-providing, energy-producing structure — a “solar pergola,” Barney calls it. Company executives expect it to meet at least 60 percent of the store’s electricity needs.
Some things don’t change, though. About half the store’s business comes from its drivethrough lanes (in a typical McDonald’s, that share can be 70 percent). So while the materials and building systems of the new McDonald’s point to an environmentally enlightened future, its car-culture business model remains stuck in the past.
That inconsistency doesn’t make the store an exercise in “green-washing,” a term critics use to describe buildings that are better at presenting the image of reducing energy use than actually saving it. But it does show that architecture must adapt to slowly changing habits even as it points the way to new ones. Hurdles abound on the road to eco-utopia.