The restaurant design introduced in 1953 with two tall yellow arches was called the Golden Arches.
Architect Stanley Clark Meston developed the distinctive building design for McDonald's restaurants in the early 1950s. The two arches were integrated into the sides of the restaurant, where they functioned both as architectural features and as highly visible roadside signs.
The first restaurant built with the arches opened in Downey, California, in 1953. At that stage, the arches were separate structures rather than the familiar single M-shaped logo. Their large scale made them easy for motorists to recognize from a distance.
The architectural arches later became the basis of McDonald's corporate symbol. A common mistake is to treat the early building design and the later combined logo as identical. They are related but distinct: the 1953 arches were physical elements of a restaurant, while the combined form became the modern logo.