The Clown Prince of Fast Food
When Jack In The Box blew up one of its clowns in a television commercial in 1980, an era of fast-food restaurant design came to a close.
With the death of Jack the Clown, San Diego-based parent company Foodmaker Inc. began chasing more sophisticated adult diners with expanded menus and restaurants that offered a more subdued atmosphere in place of the original, circus-like Jack In The Boxes, with their pointy-nosed clowns towering over engaging, whimsical buildings.
In terms of business, the new strategy proved to be dynamite. The chain now counts 1,046 restaurants, including company-owned stores and franchises, with annual sales approaching $1 billion.
But for fans of fast-food architecture, the new era of Jack In The Box design, which actually began in the 1960s, has never equaled the excitement of the company’s original restaurants, the first of which opened in El Cajon in 1951.
“They’ve become rather conventional and just blend into the landscape as far as I’m concerned,” said La Jolla artist Russell Forester, once a practicing architect who designed the first Jack In The Boxes for company founder Robert O. Peterson. “As an ex-architect, I shouldn’t be judging what other architects are doing, but the newer buildings just don’t interest me much in terms of architectural design.”
The design process has grown complex, with designs produced by a staff that includes four licensed architects and a dozen engineers, interior designers and support people at Foodmaker’s headquarters in Kearny Mesa.
During an interview, Dick Barber, who joined Foodmaker as director of architecture last year after 11 years with Burger King, and veteran staff designers Lloyd Skramstad and Bill Slatton, spread drawings and photos across a conference table and traced the evolution of Jack In The Box architecture, from Forester’s originals through the addition of mansard roofs in the 1970s and today’s outlets, which blend anonymously into shopping malls and neighborhoods across the country.
“I think there is a great awareness on Foodmaker’s part to provide a pleasing environment for customers,” Barber said. “Lately, the emphasis has been on nice landscaping. Also, there are more restric tions, and what is being done fits into an area. For example, it’s important that our signs are preserved, but they must blend with the community.”
Actually, the design process began to dampen originality as it grew more complex during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“Your hands were tied with so many restrictions, you didn’t have complete freedom to do a really personal design that you’d enter in a contest,” recalled Bill Unger, who retired in 1989 after 15 years in the architecture department. “But I think what we came up with were very good designs for the situation--they were built in the snow, in the desert, there were a lot of considerations.”
Foodmaker is now in the seventh generation of Jack In The Box designs, known as “Mark VII.” Forester’s original design was a Mark I. Within each design generation, or “Mark,” there are at least three sub-generations, and these are tailored to suit various sites and surroundings.
Although some communities may be pleased with the new, neighborly design spirit at Jack In The Box, the new restaurants definitely don’t pulse with the innocent, adolescent energy of Forester’s originals.
“Peterson and Russell Forester hit it off very good,” said La Jolla architect Don Goertz, a staff architect at Foodmaker from 1967 to 1972. “They tried to make each building like a billboard. If they couldn’t get a big sign, they wanted each building to stand out. Today, Jack Goodall, the company’s president, likes things quaint,” he said, referring to the longtime Foodmaker executive, “like used-brick Colonial-style buildings. He wants the restaurants to look more residential.”
Forester was party to a revolution in food service. Although McDonald’s and other chains were also on the cutting edge of fast-food architecture, with buildings that shared the aerodynamic sweep of 1950s cars and furniture and with signs that screamed at passing motorists, Jack In The Box was the first chain to introduce drive-through windows, according to “Orange Roofs, Golden Arches,” author Philip Langdon’s history of chain restaurants.
Forester’s Mark I design, a one-story box with circus-like decoration and a flat roof that extended over the walk-up windows, was nicknamed “Spider Legs” by subsequent Jack In The Box architects for the leaning, spindly columns that supported the overhang.
With the Mark II series--this writer’s personal favorite among all Jack In The Boxes--Forester pushed the building to two stories and used the upper walls as giant billboards decorated with a checkerboard pattern, neon “drive thru” signs and, in large neon numerals, the price of a hamburger--22 cents in the mid-1950s.
As two-dimensional compositions, the walls of these Mark II buildings packed a power reminiscent of 1940s abstract paintings by Piet Mondrian and others, although Forester was reluctant to follow this train of thought.
“If I wanted to pat myself on the back, I’d say I was very artful with the design,” he said. “But architectural solutions grow out of architectural problems. This happened to be kind of a unique problem of how you put a tiny little building on a site where you want people to drive through and buy 15 tacos. It’s a unique problem, and I think some of the solutions were unique.”
Although the buildings don’t generate the excitement they once did, the interiors are without question more comfortable and sophisticated. Indoor tables and public restrooms were added in the 1960s, and today, company interior designers produce a variety of carefully detailed interiors, including a ritzy, Art Deco look for a Jack In The Box that occupies a former Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles.
In 1991, Jack In The Box restaurants may no longer be vital fast-food icons, but the years have brought other progress--the food is better.
DESIGN NOTES: Now in San Diego bookstores, “The Gardens of Southern California,” a beautiful color coffee-table book by Berkeley landscape architect and writer Helaine Kaplan Prentice, includes sections on Quail Botanical Gardens (in Encinitas) and Balboa Park. Kaplan Prentice’s texts are thorough and useful historical accounts, as well as thoughtful critical analyses. Unfortunately, the photos by Melba Levick don’t explain the design of these landscapes as well as Kaplan’s words do. . . .
“Wallace Cunningham: Environmental Design & Theory” opens at the Mesa College Gallery today and runs through May 8. The exhibit of work by the visionary San Diego architect, who was originally inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, includes eight models, 18 photos and drawings, plus a video.
