Word: fasted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nation's highways and boulevards. ! The proliferation of chain restaurants (60,000 at last count) is a signal social fact of the past four decades, a transformation of the commercial landscape more swift and radical than any other in U.S. history. Strung out along main drags in every city, fast-food franchises become the strip, identically chaotic collages of glowing signs and prefab construction. The helter-skelter of the strip is the urban critic's most convenient cliche --cheap-jack American laissez-faire run amuck...
...indeed, Langdon and Hess make reasonable cases that fast-food restaurant design is the snappiest, purest expression of the American Zeitgeist at mid-century: architecture as billboard advertising, billboard advertising as architecture. Both authors note that the germs of the modern strip were the work of serious architects, not anonymous commercial draftsmen...
...demolished in 1984, "the major monument of Coffee Shop Modern," where "Fred Flintstone and George Jetson could meet over a cup of coffee." The descendants include Big Boy, Denny's and Sambo's. From 1950 to 1960, years of heedless American growth, cars multiplied and the great fast-food empires were born: McDonald's, Tastee Freez, Jack-in-the-Box, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Mister Donut, Pizza Hut, Burger Chef. The architecture that resulted was a sort of Sunbelt peasant modernism, simple constructivist cartoons in steel and glass, designed to catch the attention at highway speeds. Usually, as Langdon says...
...1960s, when the space-age future finally arrived, futuristic imagery was abandoned. Drive-ins died out, and fast-food restaurants became larger, more middle class. The new buildings were low slung, brownish, plastered with brick veneer. The exuberance of the late '40s and '50s architecture was replaced by bland pseudohomeyness in the '60s and '70s. Bad good taste supplanted good bad taste...
...Fast-food architecture is coming full circle too. Two years ago, outside Chicago, the deconstructionist New York firm SITE built a sublime McDonald's. The basic kit of pieces was standard, but SITE made the whole restaurant seem to hover: brick walls are cantilevered up off the ground, the roof floats above the walls. Decadent, maybe, but delightful too. In heartland suburbia, the highest of high camp has thus been achieved. When kitsch icons like McDonald's come with their own built-in ironic critique, an epoch must...