Why Burgers Matter More than Burghers in Architecture

Nicoli Ouroussoff of The New York Times gushed about Jean Nouvel's planned pile of undulating metal on 53rd Street in Manhattan as "the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation." Martin Filler, whose New York Review of Books dispatches are far more discerning, believes the stacked rectangles that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa created for the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery is "one of those rare, clarifying works of architecture that . . . demonstrates the power of understatement more convincingly than any Manhattan structure since Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building was completed in 1958."

But for the vast hoardes of Americans who will never visit The Bowery in quest of edgy art, or who will never stroll past the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Folk Art, to gaze at the Nouvel tower that will become their neighbor on 53rd Street, the signal moment in architecture for 2007 was arguably the announcement in December that the Burger King on the Route 12-A shopping strip in Lebanon, New Hampshire will be razed in May.

The Valley News reported this development on December 30, adding that the local Planning Board reacted with some consternation when the fast food chain asked for permission to replace its 5,400 square-foot eatery with a 2,200 square-foot one. It seems that even as the price of a gallon of gas climbs past $3.00, nobody wants to eat at Burger King anymore -- they want to grab their Whoppers at the drive through and snarf them down while their SUVs wallow in the Route 12-A traffic.

This is not to say that restaurants have grown unpopular -- quite the contrary. As the newspaper noted, the sit-down trade has largely been claimed by outfits one rung higher on the food chain -- places like Panera's and Chile's. So Burger King joins the White River Junction McDonald's, and the Wendy's across Route 12-A in West Lebanon, in opting for a drastically dessicated dining room. And, by the way, don't get the idea you'll be served faster if you eschew the creeping drive-through line, park and bolt inside. The time you will spend standing at the counter trying to get someone's attention, as the employees scurry about communicating with drive-through customers via their headphones, will give you plenty of time to reflect on the evolution of the fast-food industry.

If you happen to be waiting at the Burger King between now and May, take a moment and look to your left at the dining room because its demise will claim the only really interesting architectural space on the Route 12-A shopping strip. In a precinct of bland, big boxes, this semicircular room, with its muscular radial columns that curve their way to the ground, enclosed in a continous ring of windows, testifies to an earlier but now-concluded era.

It was a time when architects, even ones designing workaday buildings like Burger Kings, thought that new and different would be just swell. No fake mansards and faux lintels in the windows like the ones at the McDonald's next door; this hamburger emporium in its rotundity was apparently designed to evoke the chain's flame-broiled eponymous product itself.

Maybe the anonymous designer who conjured the West Lebanon Burger King was not thinking about Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West as s/he conjured those mighty support beams. Perhaps the architect was not consciously emulating Marvin Goody, the guy who created the fabulous, circular Monsanto House of the Future that stood at Disneyland in California from 1957 to 1967. These ideas got into the national architectural DNA of the time -- and now they are gone, along with the optimism about the built world they reflected.

Now, in the everyday world regular people inhabit, as distinct from the fanciful dimension of museums and high-rises in Manhattan, a non-residential building is more often than not a mere support structure for the neon billboard, invisible kitchen and service portal that exist to service you while you remain in your vehicle. The destruction of the Route 12-A Burger King is a sad drama that is playing itself out in shopping strips everywhere, which is to say ubiquitously in the USA because shopping strips are America in the early 21st Century.

Whoppers and Quarter Pounders are rational consumer choices. The nutritional implications notwithstanding, it's terribly inefficient for every American household to manufacture meals in its isolated kitchen. It's lonely too, and so we venture forth into the public sphere in search of community and a meal prepared by people who do it for a living on the scale of mass production. In a better world, our architects and social planners would note this phenomenon and respond by creating new kinds of buildings to serve new kinds of communities that truly serve the yearnings of real people. The Cobb Hill Co-Housing Community in Hartland Four Corners is a noteworthy example.

But we are stuck in this world, in which the best architecture happens on behalf of museums and other institutions that attract the interest of the ultra-wealthy. Dartmouth College plans a Jorge Silvetti building that has every prospect of adding something hitherto unexperienced to downtown Hanover. Such projects, like the new Sejima and Nishizawa building on The Bowery, these projects are worthy being noticed. And so, at least for a few more months, is your friendly neighborhood Burger King.