Who designed the 1953 McDonald’s restaurant with its original roadside Golden Arches?

Architect Stanley Clark Meston designed the 1953 McDonald’s restaurant with its original roadside Golden Arches. His design turned the building itself into a highly visible piece of advertising.

Meston worked with McDonald’s on a restaurant form that included two large yellow arches rising from the sides of the building. The arches were not initially a flat corporate mark; they were structural and decorative elements intended to attract drivers.

Ray Kroc later expanded McDonald’s through franchising, but he did not design the original architectural arches. The McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice, developed the restaurant business, while Meston supplied the architectural design associated with the early postwar expansion.

The physical arches eventually inspired the company’s simplified M-shaped emblem. This is why the logo’s history is partly an architectural story, not only a graphic-design story.