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Ray Kroc with his hamburger stand in Des Plaines, Southern California, before spreading the golden arches nationwide in 1955. In fact, due to the favourable climate of the “Golden State”, California is home to many fast-food chains. Designed by architect Stanley Clark, McDonalds’ buildings are the essence of function and efficiency that is the hallmark of McDonalisation while the exterior was aimed at self-adverting and eye catching architecture with its golden arches.29 The term given to this style is architainment and it is a style can be traced over seventy years ago on standard roads. In the 1920s California’s automobile culture had been accompanied by ‘eye-catchers’ to attract motorists with restaurants that resembled hot dogs, owls, milk cans and doughnuts. 30 McDonalds is the embodiment of the drive-in economy and the architectural style of architainment that has become a distinctive feature of roadside ‘eyecatchers’. The highway had managed to contribute greatly to the American economy. Improved mobility has seen a burgeoning transportation industry based around the motor truck while drive-ins have established a sound business based on the roadside while making a distinctive style of architecture. Drive-ins will be further analysed as part of the automotive culture in Part II. 1.4 Los Angeles and the Sprawl The vast and rapid expansion of residential suburbia in the United States is of main concern for environmentalists, socialists, and architectural critics. Approximately seventy-five percent of all new construction in recent decades is categorised as real estate development in the outer suburbs and exurbs that has contributed to urban sprawl.31 The decline of inner suburbs is a direct result of urban sprawl. Mike Davis cited the downward spiral of aging districts to the attraction of living in newer and aesthetically pleasing outer suburbs.32 These modern problems all stem from the mass development of highways that have encouraged urban cities to expand. 29 Alan Hess, ‘The origins of McDonald’s Golden Arches’, Journal Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 45, No.1 (March 1986) pp 60-2
30 David Gebhard and Robert Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Utah: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1994) pp xxi-xxii
31 Ellen Dunham-Jones, ‘75%: The Next Big Architectural Project’, William S. Saunders (ed.) Sprawl and Suburbia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) p 1
32 Mike Davis, ‘Ozzie and Harriet in Hell: On the Decline of Inner Suburbs’, William S. Saunders (ed.), Sprawl and Suburbia, p 28