The McDonald’s redesign is getting some more attention in blogland. A really powerful rant (even if you don’t support all the points) comes from the consistently acerbic Marginal Utility

So having abetted the atomization of American society, undermining traditional rituals of eating that once fostered polite society and turning food into on-the-go fuel, McDonald’s now wants to present the simulacrum of what it helped destroy, an ambiotronic environment in which the semblance of civility is exhibited for maximum marketing appeal. It wants to cater to the illusion that people have time to hang out, that people enjoy being in public with strangers, that its own food is something to be savored rather than inhaled on the run. The corporation can subsidize a few people hogging the comfy chairs and watching the TVs in order to give its bread-and-butter customers – the harried single people in a hurry – a warm, fuzzy feeling about what they are about to eat, as if a Big Mac can give them access to the laid-back linger-zone life by proxy. But most people, McDonald’s knows, don’t really want to linger. Rest assured, regardless of the redesign, the heart of McDonald’s will remain as hard a plastic as ever.

BusinessWeek writes about a just-launching redesign of McDonald’s stores, trying to bring them up to date. This is sure to be a big design story in the business press, with lots of oohing and aahing about the furniture and so on, but the article points to some serious business challenges that the company faces here (and presumably anytime they want to do some sort of reinvention).

In a recent letter to management at the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, about 160 franchisees from North Carolina spelled out why they oppose the new plan. They say the roof change erases 40 years of brand building and that ‘there has been no business case presented which justifies the change.’ Says Frederick Huebner, who owns 11 McDonald’s in North Carolina: ‘We don’t want to lose the iconic look of what we’ve got.’ If franchisees balk, McDonald’s can refuse to renew their contract.

Check out the new designs, which seem to bring McDonald’s firmly into the 90s.

I have posted a Flickr photoset of pictures I took last year at the IIT student center, designed by Rem Koolhaas.

I’ve posted my photos from the Seattle Central Library on flickr. It’s a pretty interesting building designed by Rem Koolhaas. The EPIC2005 conference offered a tour of the new library and I did my best to capture some of the experience.

BusinessWeek describes a curious design research initiative. A UK home builder has a family living in a sensor-filled concept house, where the people are all RFID-tagged. They’ll collect usage data for six months and then use the resulting who/where/when/how-long data to improve the home’s design. Just like using weblogs to redesign a website – you know what people have been doing, but you have no idea why. Unless you ask. And the families in this project will be extensively interviewed by a “consumer researcher” so we figure they’ll get that piece of the puzzle too.

The NYT writes a front-page story about the growth in housing developments in the US in areas that were formerly “the middle of nowhere.” Beyond being generally interesting as a trend, I was intrigued by the (perhaps not novel but at least unique to me) teaser of how they are figuring out what to put into these homes.

One area in which KB Home takes pride is its market research. It asks things like where people want their kitchens and how much more of a commute they can stomach. And it surveys its own buyers to get a comprehensive idea of who they are and why they bought.
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In its most recent survey of Tampa home buyers, KB asked people what they valued the most in their home and community. They wanted more space and a greater sense of security. Safety always ranks second, even in communities where there is virtually no crime.

Asked what they wanted in a home, 88 percent said a home security system, 93 percent said they preferred neighborhoods with “more streetlights” and 96 percent insisted on deadbolt locks or security doors.

So KB Home offers them all. “It’s up to us to figure out what people really want and to translate that into architecture,” said Erik Kough, KB’s vice president for architecture. And the company designs its communities with winding streets with sidewalks and cul-de-sacs to keep traffic slow, to give a sense of containment and to give an appearance distinctly unlike the urban grid that the young, middle-class families instinctively associate with crime. “I definitely feel safe here. I feel protected,” said Lisa Crawford, who moved to New River about a year ago with her husband, Steve, and their two children.

“And I can tell you that the people in Tampa are a whole lot different than the people here,” Ms. Crawford said. “In Tampa, there’s a faster pace. I like it here, that it’s more of a community, more of a small-town feel.”

The photo is definitely quaint but still matches our iconic image of how trading (whatever that is; most of us have little understanding of the mechanics of markets or the activity of trading). Maybe we picture men in jackets with numbers on ’em, holding phones and throwing pieces of paper and yelling and yelling. But that era has disappeared as technology has eliminated the need for a central place. Trading takes place in distributed facilities, owned and operated by “banks” (including Morgan Stanley et al) not in centralized facilities owned and operated by exchanges. The Chron today considers the history of the exchange in San Francisco, now a gym.

A 1999 article in The Chronicle reported that only about 5 percent of the 17.5 million shares traded daily there involved personal interaction on the exchange floor.

The romance was ending. Warren Langley, president and chief operating officer of the exchange from 1996 to 1999, wrote in an e-mail that those who had devoted their lives to the exchange “really were in pain as the world of technology and telecommunications made floor-based exchanges obsolete (and made the value of their jobs go away).”

In 2001, the exchange announced a merger with the electronic marketplace corporation Archipelago, eliminating the need for brokers to interact face to face, and sold the trading floor in 2002.

If you attended the 2002 IDSA conference, you may have seen architect Bruce Tomb talk about his experience with his others in his community graffiti-ing or removing graffiti from his building, and how he essentially turned it into an ongoing art project. I wrote about it here (six boxes down, in blue) and today the SF Chron has an in-depth piece about Tomb and his building.

The posters are bright, papered over each other and peeling. A public gallery of outrage and passion on a former police station that once housed drug dealers, gang members and drunks in its holding cells, the dozens of radical statements plastered on this wall at 23rd and Valencia streets make up what may be the most outspoken site in the country.

Unbeknownst to most passers-by who stop to stare, behind the poster wall lives a quiet man who furiously defends its aesthetic. With his hair slicked neatly back and black Dickies pants that match the sturdy frames of his glasses, Bruce Tomb does not look like a fighter. But for the past seven years, he has fiercely protected the 25-foot square front wall of his home, the former Mission Police Station.

Tomb, an architect, views the 1950s-style industrial building, in which he lives with his family and operates his business, as a beautiful piece of modern architecture and a valuable part of city history. Some of his neighbors disagree, seeing the boxy structure vacated by police in 1994 for a larger precinct house at 17th, six blocks down Valencia Street, as an eyesore.

I flew JetBlue yesterday out of JFK and had a chance to wander next door to the shuttered TWA terminal, one of my favorite buildings. I flew out of there many years ago, just once, and it was pretty neat. See the whole set of pictures.

SF Chron story about an architect calling for a boycott on designing prisons

So the 31-year-old San Francisco architect changed course — and issued a call to action to the drafting crowd that has made national waves. Sperry wants architects — and their brethren engineers, designers and planners — to refuse to design prisons.

He realizes that a boycott is a drastic measure for a profession whose forays into collective activism have been few. Its radicalism tends to be confined to ‘green’ solutions for buildings, such as the Healdsburg winery that Sperry worked on that was constructed out of straw bales.

With earnest sincerity, Sperry sees his boycott as a way to start a conversation about prison reform with an audience largely unfamiliar with the issue.

“Prisons are so often associated with their buildings, so I thought this would be a way for architects to connect the issue with their work, with something they could do about it,” said Sperry.