Stanley Clark Meston designed the McDonald’s restaurant buildings that featured the original roadside arches.
Meston worked with McDonald’s founders Richard and Maurice McDonald during the early 1950s. His design used bold red-and-white forms and large yellow arches rising from the sides of the building. The architecture was intended to be highly visible to passing motorists and to communicate speed, cleanliness, and modernity.
The first restaurant using the arch design opened in Downey, California, in 1953. That building, now preserved as the oldest surviving McDonald’s restaurant, illustrates how the brand’s visual identity began with architecture rather than a printed logo.
Meston is sometimes confused with Jim Schindler. Meston designed the buildings and their arches; Schindler later turned the paired arches into the stylized corporate logo. Those related contributions are both important but answer different historical questions.